If you are looking for a convenient way to process images via numpy arrays, then there is good news because there are already python tools in place allowing you to do that. Before you can get started you need: A working python installation. I use Python36 . A numpy package installation which you can easily install by typing pip install numpy in a command shell on windows. The python scipy package which can be installed with pip as well by typing pip install scipy in a command shell. And lastly you need the image processing package Pillow which can also be obtained and installed via command shell by typing pip install Pillow. Once you have completed the points above, then you can use the scipy.misc module to process images by treating them as numpy arrays. To start you off with, a great collection of examples can be found here .