Changing UIImage contents

Hi,
You're not supposed to be able to alter the content of a UIImage directly,
but I wanted to, so I loaded an image file from main bundle into an NSdata array,
and from there to a C char array, make changes there, and load back to UIImage from there.

Code:

	// Do once at startup… ie. ViewDidLoad

	unsigned char imgfile[imgbuffersize];
	int imgfilelength;

	UIImage *myImage;
	NSData *mynewData;

    NSString *filePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"image" ofType:@"bmp"];
    NSData *myData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:filePath];
    
    NSUInteger len = [myData length];
    Byte *byteData = (Byte*)malloc(len);
    memcpy(byteData, [myData bytes], len);
    
    imgfilelength = len;
    
    for (int ix = 0; ix < len; ix++) {
    imgfile[ix] = byteData[ix];
    }


endless_loop() {
	//
	//Access and change bitmap data stored the imgfile array here
	//for example, make the left half of the image grayscale
        //by finding the mean average of the RGB component of each
        //pixel you want to change, then write that value to all three
        //components of the pixel.


    mynewData = [NSData dataWithBytes:(const void *)imgfile length:sizeof(char)*imgfilelength];
    myImage = [UIImage imageWithData: mynewData];
    CGPoint imagePoint = CGPointMake(5.0,150);
    [myImage drawAtPoint:imagePoint];
}

Aside from possible overhead, which I'm not sure about since UIImage is only a
pointer if I'm not mistaken, I don't think the entire image is being copied
from one location in memory to another for each instance.

Is there anything bad happening here memory wise?
I have recently treated the C bitmap array as a memory buffer,
and have a program using it to transform the original image from the main bundle.

 

Interestingly enough, although iOS doesn't appear to support it,
it's possible to save a bitmap image file to the photos app with this:

Code:

       myData = [NSData dataWithBytes:(const void *)imgfile length:sizeof(char)*imgfilelength];
       myImage = [UIImage imageWithData: myData];
       UIImageWriteToSavedPhotosAlbum(myImage, nil, nil, nil);

The bmp images work perfectly in the photos app,
but when transferred to a PC, none of the programs will open them.
One of the problems is the image height is -568 instead of 568,
among other problems.