Image scaling / memory 3 questions

Question

I hate to post this because I am sure there are a million posts about this, but I am still having a problem and it is taking tooooo long and I just cant find the solution. I am trying to scale images down to thumbnails. The images are really large and are consuming too much memory. Is there a way to scale the images and only retain the scaled bytes in memory rather than all of the image data.
I am assuming this is still stored because my program runs out of memory after creating about 3 thumbnails of large images, but works fine for smaller ones. I am loading the images in a thread (one at a time).
2. I tried to use the AffineTransformationOP and my images came out blueish? Anyone know about that. Not a major concern
3. Is it possible just to store the graphics from an image and use that to paint the component and completely eliminate having the image left in memory? maybe..??
persistantGraphics = image.creategraphics();
persistantGraphics.drawImage(image,0,0,null);
image = null;
paintComponent(Graphics g){ g = persistantGraphics;}Here is my scaling code.
BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(theFile);
public static BufferedImage percentScale(BufferedImage orig, double percent){
        if(orig == null){return null;}
        int transparent = orig.getColorModel().getTransparency();
        GraphicsEnvironment ge = GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment();
        GraphicsDevice gd = ge.getDefaultScreenDevice();
        GraphicsConfiguration gc = gd.getDefaultConfiguration();
        BufferedImage image = gc.createCompatibleImage((int)(orig.getWidth() * percent), (int)(orig.getHeight() * percent), transparent);
        Graphics2D g = image.createGraphics();
        g.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_INTERPOLATION, RenderingHints.VALUE_INTERPOLATION_BICUBIC);
        AffineTransform xform = AffineTransform.getScaleInstance(percent, percent);
        g.drawRenderedImage(orig, xform);
        g.dispose();
        orig.flush();
        return image;
    }//end percentScale

Answer 1

Image#getScaledInstance()