Convert image to a matrix in python

Up till now no one told about matplotlib.image:

import matplotlib.image as img
image = img.imread(file_name)

Now the image would be a 3D numpy array

print image.shape

Would be something like: (317, 504, 3)

scipy.misc.imread() is deprecated now. We can use imageio.imread instead of that to read it as a Numpy array

scipy.misc.imread() will return a Numpy array, which is handy for lots of things.