What are the differences between a Windows bitmap and DIBSection?

Question

I'm loading a DIBSection from a file with the following:

HBITMAP bmpIn = (HBITMAP) LoadImage(NULL, _T("c:\\Temp\\Temp.bmp"), IMAGE_BITMAP, 0, 0, LR_CREATEDIBSECTION | LR_LOADFROMFILE);

Empirically I've discovered the following differences between the loaded bitmap and the bitmaps that I've used in the past, but I can't find any documentation stating that there should be a difference.

• The lines are ordered in memory top down rather than bottom up. I've verified that the .bmp file itself is ordered bottom up.
• The row padding is to a multiple of 2 bytes rather than 4.

I've also discovered a documented difference when you use CreateDIBSection to create a DIBSection from scratch.

• The DIBSECTION.dsHandle and BITMAP.bmBits values returned by GetObject will be NULL.

Where's the documentation for the first two differences, and am I missing anything? This is with Windows 7 but I can't imagine it would be different for other versions of Windows.

Edit: Some additional details. Here's a hex dump of temp.bmp; it's a 7x7 image with a white stripe down the right side and blue values incrementing along the left (0x10,0x20,etc.). You can see that the bottom line (00,00,70) is first and that there's 3 bytes of padding.

00: 42 4d de 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 36 00 00 00 28 00
10: 00 00 07 00 00 00 07 00 00 00 01 00 18 00 00 00
20: 00 00 a8 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
30: 00 00 00 00 00 00 70 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
40: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00 00 00 60 00
50: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
60: ff ff ff 00 00 00 50 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
70: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00 00 00 40 00
80: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
90: ff ff ff 00 00 00 30 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
a0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00 00 00 20 00
b0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
c0: ff ff ff 00 00 00 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
d0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00 00 00

Here's a sample program to read the .bmp file and write out the contents. I've removed error checking for brevity.

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
   HBITMAP bmpIn = (HBITMAP) LoadImage(NULL, argv[1], IMAGE_BITMAP, 0, 0, LR_CREATEDIBSECTION | LR_LOADFROMFILE);
   FILE * out = _tfopen(argv[2], _T("wb"));
   DIBSECTION obj = {0};
   GetObject(bmpIn, sizeof(obj), &obj);
   cout << "dsBm.bmHeight = " << obj.dsBm.bmHeight << endl;
   cout << "dsBmih.biHeight = " << obj.dsBmih.biHeight << endl;
   cout << "sizeof(DIBSECTION) = " << sizeof(DIBSECTION) << endl;
   fwrite(&obj, sizeof(DIBSECTION), 1, out);
   int stride = (((obj.dsBmih.biWidth * obj.dsBmih.biBitCount) + 15) / 16) * 2;
   int bytecount = abs(obj.dsBmih.biHeight) * stride;
   vector<BYTE> bits(bytecount);
   GetBitmapBits(bmpIn, bytecount, &bits[0]);
   fwrite(&bits[0], 1, bytecount, out);
   fclose(out);
   return 0;
}

And here's the output from the above program along with a hex dump of the file produced:

dsBm.bmHeight = 7
dsBmih.biHeight = 7
sizeof(DIBSECTION) = 84
00: 00 00 00 00 07 00 00 00 07 00 00 00 18 00 00 00
10: 01 00 18 00 00 00 11 00 28 00 00 00 07 00 00 00
20: 07 00 00 00 01 00 18 00 00 00 00 00 a8 00 00 00
30: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
40: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
50: 00 00 00 00 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
60: 00 00 00 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00 20 00 00 00 00 00
70: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00
80: 30 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
90: 00 00 ff ff ff 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
a0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00 50 00 00 00
b0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ff ff
c0: ff 00 60 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
d0: 00 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00 70 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
e0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00

Answer 1

Call GetDIBits instead of GetBitmapBits. The docs for GetBitmapBits (here) indicate that this is returning data for a device-dependent bitmap, whereas you have a device-independent bitmap. They also indicate that this call shouldn't be used and is just there for 16-bit compatibility. So, using GetDIBits should do the trick.