How do I convert a PIL Image into a NumPy array?

You're not saying how exactly putdata() is not behaving. I'm assuming you're doing

>>> pic.putdata(a)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "...blablabla.../PIL/Image.py", line 1185, in putdata
    self.im.putdata(data, scale, offset)
SystemError: new style getargs format but argument is not a tuple

This is because putdata expects a sequence of tuples and you're giving it a numpy array. This

>>> data = list(tuple(pixel) for pixel in pix)
>>> pic.putdata(data)

will work but it is very slow.

As of PIL 1.1.6, the "proper" way to convert between images and numpy arrays is simply

>>> pix = numpy.array(pic)

although the resulting array is in a different format than yours (3-d array or rows/columns/rgb in this case).

Then, after you make your changes to the array, you should be able to do either pic.putdata(pix) or create a new image with Image.fromarray(pix).

Open I as an array:

>>> I = numpy.asarray(PIL.Image.open('test.jpg'))

Do some stuff to I, then, convert it back to an image:

>>> im = PIL.Image.fromarray(numpy.uint8(I))

Source: Filter numpy images with FFT, Python

If you want to do it explicitly for some reason, there are pil2array() and array2pil() functions using getdata() on this page in correlation.zip.

Convert Numpy to PIL image and PIL to Numpy

import numpy as np
from PIL import Image

def pilToNumpy(img):
    return np.array(img)

def NumpyToPil(img):
    return Image.fromarray(img)

If your image is stored in a Blob format (i.e. in a database) you can use the same technique explained by Billal Begueradj to convert your image from Blobs to a byte array.

In my case, I needed my images where stored in a blob column in a db table:

def select_all_X_values(conn):
    cur = conn.cursor()
    cur.execute("SELECT ImageData from PiecesTable")    
    rows = cur.fetchall()    
    return rows

I then created a helper function to change my dataset into np.array:

X_dataset = select_all_X_values(conn)
imagesList = convertToByteIO(np.array(X_dataset))

def convertToByteIO(imagesArray):
    """
    # Converts an array of images into an array of Bytes
    """
    imagesList = []

    for i in range(len(imagesArray)):  
        img = Image.open(BytesIO(imagesArray[i])).convert("RGB")
        imagesList.insert(i, np.array(img))

    return imagesList

After this, I was able to use the byteArrays in my Neural Network.

plt.imshow(imagesList[0])

def imshow(img):
    img = img / 2 + 0.5     # unnormalize
    npimg = img.numpy()
    plt.imshow(np.transpose(npimg, (1, 2, 0)))
    plt.show()

You can transform the image into numpy by parsing the image into numpy() function after squishing out the features( unnormalization)