Are there methods within Xojo (on OSX) for carrying out picture/image edits such as soften, sharpen, lighten, darken etc. or do these need to be calculated and applied to the image. I have been looking at RGBSurface.Transform as an option.
Also special effects on images, are there OSX specific calls which need to be carried out to carry out image manipulations?
There are a couple of resources, afaik.
There is a image library (open source, free) somewhere around (forgot its name)
You can use declares to leverage the systems functionalities (hint: ask Sam)
There is the Einhugur plugin that has plenty of image manipulation functions built in
The image library is called ImagePlay. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/imageplay/ . Of course, the MBS plugin has tons of stuff, too.