Change html canvas black background to white background when creating jpg image from png image

This blackening occurs because the 'image/jpeg' conversion involves setting the alpha of all canvas pixels to fully opaque (alpha=255). The problem is that transparent canvas pixels are colored fully-black-but-transparent. So when you turn these black pixels opaque, the result is a blackened jpeg.

The workaround is to manually change all non-opaque canvas pixels to your desired white color instead of black.

That way when they are made opaque they will appear as white instead of black pixels.

Here's how:

// change non-opaque pixels to white
var imgData=ctx.getImageData(0,0,canvas.width,canvas.height);
var data=imgData.data;
for(var i=0;i<data.length;i+=4){
    if(data[i+3]<255){
        data[i]=255;
        data[i+1]=255;
        data[i+2]=255;
        data[i+3]=255;
    }
}
ctx.putImageData(imgData,0,0);

This answer is a bit longer, but I find it to be more 'correct' in that it handles these things without directly modifying raw canvas data. I find that to be a pretty messy and theoretically unsatisfying solution. There are built in functions to achieve that, and they ought to be used. Here is the solution I found/pilfered:

function canvasToImage(backgroundColor){

var context = document.getElementById('canvas').getContext('2d');

canvas = context.canvas;
//cache height and width        
var w = canvas.width;
var h = canvas.height;

var data;

//get the current ImageData for the canvas.
data = context.getImageData(0, 0, w, h);

//store the current globalCompositeOperation
var compositeOperation = context.globalCompositeOperation;

//set to draw behind current content
context.globalCompositeOperation = "destination-over";

//set background color
context.fillStyle = backgroundColor;

//draw background / rect on entire canvas
context.fillRect(0,0,w,h);

//get the image data from the canvas
var imageData = this.canvas.toDataURL("image/jpeg");

//clear the canvas
context.clearRect (0,0,w,h);

//restore it with original / cached ImageData
context.putImageData(data, 0,0);

//reset the globalCompositeOperation to what it was
context.globalCompositeOperation = compositeOperation;

//return the Base64 encoded data url string
return imageData;
}

Basically, you create a white background image and underlay it under the canvas and then print that. This function is mostly plagiarized from someone's blog, but it required a bit of modification -- such as actually getting the context -- and copied directly from my (working) code, so as long as your canvas element has the id 'canvas', you should be able to copy/paste it and have it work.

This is the blog post I modified it from:

http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/01/31/setting-the-background-color-when-generating-images-from-canvas-todataurl/

The big advantage of my function over this is that it outputs to jpeg instead of png, which is more likely to work well in chrome, which has a dataurl limit of 2MB, and it actually grabs the context, which was a glaring omission in the original function.

After spending a lot of time on this and this post specifically, and these solutions kinda worked expect I just couldn't get the canvas to look right. Anyway I found this solution elsewhere and wanted to post it here incase it helps someone else from spending hours trying to get the black background to white and look like the original.

public getURI(): string {
    let canvas = <HTMLCanvasElement>document.getElementById('chartcanvas');
    var newCanvas = <HTMLCanvasElement>canvas.cloneNode(true);
    var ctx = newCanvas.getContext('2d');
    ctx.fillStyle = "#FFF";
    ctx.fillRect(0, 0, newCanvas.width, newCanvas.height);
    ctx.drawImage(canvas, 0, 0);
    return newCanvas.toDataURL("image/jpeg");
}