ImageMagick

infobox software
name = ImageMagick

caption = ImageMagick logo
developer = ImageMagick Studio LLC
latest_release_version = 6.4.4
latest_release_date = release date and age|2008|9|29
operating_system = Cross-platform
genre = Image manipulation
license = [http://www.imagemagick.org/script/license.php ImageMagick License]
website = http://imagemagick.org/

ImageMagick is a free [ [http://www.imagemagick.org/script/license.php ImageMagick license] ] software suite for image manipulation and display, supporting close to 100 image formats. It is mainly used to perform various transformation and conversion operations on images.

Features

The software mainly consists of a number of command line interface utilities for manipulating images. ImageMagick does not have a GUI based interface to edit images, like in Photoshop or GIMP, but instead modifies an already existing image by taking in various command-line parameters. Nevertheless, ImageMagick also includes an X Window graphical user interface for rendering and manipulating images called IMDisplay and API libraries for many programming languages. The program uses magic numbers to identify image file formats.

A number of programs, such as MediaWiki, phpBB and vBulletin, can use ImageMagick to create image thumbnails if it is installed. ImageMagick is also used by other programs, such as LyX, for converting images.

ImageMagick has a fully integrated perl API called PerlMagick [ [http://www.imagemagick.org/script/perl-magick.php PerlMagick, Perl API for ImageMagick] ] .

File format conversion

One of the basic and thoroughly-implemented features of ImageMagick is its ability to efficiently and accurately convert images between different file formats. Refer to the ImageMagick web site for the [http://www.imagemagick.org/script/formats.php extensive list] of supported formats.

Color quantization

The number of colors in an image can be reduced to an arbitrary number and this is done by intelligently weighing the most prominent color values present among the pixels of the image. Note that many other image handling applications do not support a color palette of an arbitrary number of colors; if, for example, you reduce an image to 13 colors via ImageMagick some applications will open it but some will regard it as corrupted.

A related capability is the posterization artistic effect, which also reduces the number of colors represented in an image. The difference between this and standard color quantization is that while in standard quantization the final palette is selected based upon a weighting of the prominence of existing colors in the image, posterization creates a palette of colors smoothly distributed across the spectrum represented in the image. Whereas with standard color quantization all of the final color values are ones that were in the original image, the color values in a posterized image may not have been present in the original image but are in between the original color values.

Dithering

A fine of control is provided for the dithering that occurs during color and shading alterations, including the ability to generate halftone dithering.

Artistic effects

ImageMagick includes a variety of filters and features intended to create artistic effects:
* [http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/transform/#charcoal Charcoal Sketch Transform]
* Posterization

Distribution

ImageMagick is cross-platform, and runs on all recent versions of Microsoft Windows (except Windows 95), and Unix-like systems including Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD. The project's source code can be compiled for other systems, including AmigaOS 4.0.

Related software

GraphicsMagick is a fork of ImageMagick 5.5.2 emphasising the cross-release stability of the programming API and user interface.

See also

* DevIL
* GD Graphics Library
* Netpbm

References

External links

* [http://www.imagemagick.org ImageMagick] - Official project homepage
* [http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/ ImageMagick] Common Usage
* [http://www.linux.com/articles/44594] Advanced image editing from the command line with ImageMagick