Accessing image in more than one method

Question

Hi,
I am trying to create an image manipulation system. For the purposes of the example I am trying to load an image into the system, and then within one method, call another to manipulate the image.
I am having problems with the accessing of the image. Here is the code:
public class imageRead3 {
public static Image blur(String begin) {
    String end = "blur_pred_1280.jpg";                                        
    ImageDecoder input = ImageFile.createImageDecoder(begin);
    ImageEncoder output = ImageFile.createImageEncoder(end);
    float sigma = 1.0f;
    BufferedImage inputImage = input.decodeAsBufferedImage();
    Kernel kernel = new GaussianKernel(sigma);
    System.out.println("Convolving with a " + kernel.getWidth() +
         "x" + kernel.getHeight() + " kernel...");
    ConvolveOp blurOp = new ConvolveOp(kernel);
    IntervalTimer timer = new IntervalTimer();
    timer.start();
    BufferedImage outputImage = blurOp.filter(inputImage, null);
    System.out.println("Gaussian blur finished [" +
      timer.stop() + " sec]");
    output.encode(outputImage);
    return outputImage;
  public static Vector doSomething() throws IOException {
     String begin = "pred_1280.jpg";
     Image image = blur(begin);  //This is where I am having problems.  I want to use this method to run a gaussian blur over the image.  I then want to use that blurred image within this method.
     int w = image.getWidth(), h = image.getHeight();
     ....do something with blurred image
  public static void main(String[] args){     
    try {
      doSomething();
    catch ( Exception e ) {
     return;
  }Now the blur method saves the blurred image file to disk. I want to be able to access it without saving it to disk first. Is there any way I can do this?
With thanks
N.

Answer 1

Well you got two potions
1 - pas it as an argument
2 - put it in member variable of the class.
but the best to do will be define a good class to represent your image and then write method on that class to manipulate it.
You can use the constructor to create an object of it and load the image and the call other methods to manipulate the image