Many image processing tasks and even file type conversions, say from 32 bit-per-pixel to 8 bit-per-pixel can be speeded up by accessing the pixel data array directly, rather than relying on GetPixel and SetPixel or other methods.
You will be aware that .NET is a managed code system which most often uses managed data so it's not often that we need to gain access to bytes stored in memory anymore however, image manipulation is one of the few times when managed data access is just too slow and so we need to delve once again into the knotty problems of finding the data and manipulating it.
Before I start on the subject in hand, I'll ju