Copy Render Output to Clipboard?

I’ve looked and looked, but I can’t seem to find a way to copy the render output to the clipboard. :frowning: (Why would anyone want to do this? Because it’s much faster and less of a hassle to copy 'n paste directly into an image editor, rather than saving to an actual image file.)

Well, one could use Alt + PrintScreen to copy the render window to the clipboard. But that copies the entire render window, including the menus, border, buttons, etc. I’d have to carefully use the mask tool in the image editor to cut out only the render output.

I did find a script that allows one to copy and paste render layers to the clipboard. But this is about Blender layers and does not allow one to copy the actual render output.

Q: How hard would it be to write a python script to do this? All I need is the option to copy the render output to the clipboard. Nothing more. One could add an extra option to the Image menu on the Render Window, right next to “Save As Image F3”. Or, one could enable it via another keypress combination. Perhaps CTRL + F3? (Or maybe both?)

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This is OS dependent and probably requires additional Python packages.
See e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7050448/write-image-to-windows-clipboard-in-python-with-pil-and-win32clipboard

A screenshot could be taken, but the clipboard issue remains. Out of the box, it’s possible to capture a certain area only. But that includes all regions. With some more coding, it’s possible to just capture the main region however (using bgl). The image quality might be lowered, especially if the result is hires and the image editor small on screen. Thus, it’s better to save the result to file, whatever you do with it later (AFAIK Image.pixels is empty for render results :()