I use this all the time. I love that it's simple enough that I can type something like those two lines off the top of my head at this point. And as an alterna

I use this all the time. I love that it's simple enough that I can type something like those two lines off the top of my head at this point. And as an alternative to that fwrite(), another common pattern that I use is: for (int y = 0; y < HEIGHT; ++y) for (int x = 0; x < WIDTH; ++x) { // ... compute r, g, and b one pixel at a time printf("%c%c%c", r, g, b); } I also find ImageMagick very convenient for working with the format when my program writes a PPM to stdout: ./myprog | convert - foo.png or: ./myprog | display -