cannot read in image in colour in opencv python - python-2.7

Question

I have just started to use Opencv using python in windows(PyCharm IDE).
I tried to read a color image. But it got displayed in Grayscale. So I tried to convert it as below:
import cv2
img = cv2.imread('C:\Ai.jpg', 0)
b,g,r = cv2.split(img)
rgb = cv2.merge([r,g,b])
cv2.imshow('image', img)
cv2.imshow('rgb image',rgb)
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()
But i am getting an error:
"b, g, r = cv2.split(img) ValueError: need more than 1 value to
unpack"
Can you guys please help me out?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There is a problem in the second line of your code img = cv2.imread('C:\Ai.jpg', 0), as per the documentation, 0 value corresponds to cv2.IMREAD_GRAYSCALE, This is the reason why you are getting a grayscale image. You may want to change it to 1 if you want to load it in RGB color space or -1 if you want to include any other channel like alpha channel which is encoded along with the image.
And b,g,r = cv2.split(img) was raising an error because img at that point of time is a grayscale image which had only one channel, and it is impossible to split a 1 channel image to 3 respective channels.
Your final snippet may look like this:
import cv2
# Reading the image in RGB mode
img = cv2.imread('C:\Ai.jpg', 1)
# No need of following lines:
# b,g,r = cv2.split(img)
# rgb = cv2.merge([r,g,b])
# cv2.imshow('rgb image',rgb)
# Displaying the image
cv2.imshow('image', img)
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()

Answer 2

Try this solution
Read and convert image into RGB format:
If you have a color image and reading it using OpenCV. First, convert it in RGB colour format
image = cv2.imread(C:\Ai.jpg') #cv2 reading image in BGR
image = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2RGB) #convert it into RGB format
To display it we can use cv2.imshow, matplotlib or PIL as follows
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline
from PIL import Image
Now print using matplotlib:
plt.imshow(image)
print using PIL
Image.fromarray(image)