|
Screenshot
ImageMagick 6.0.6 in Knoppix 4.0.2 |
|
| Developer(s) | ImageMagick Studio LLC |
| Stable release | 6.7.4-4 / 1 January 2012 |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Image manipulation |
| License | Apache 2.0 License |
| Website | www.imagemagick.org |
ImageMagick is an open source[1] software suite for displaying, converting, and editing raster image files. It can read and write over 100 image file formats. ImageMagick is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Contents |
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, as do Adobe Photoshop and GIMP, but instead modifies existing images as directed by 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,[2] as well as many other APIs.
One of the basic and thoroughly-implemented features of ImageMagick is its ability to efficiently and accurately convert images between different file formats.
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, one reduces 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.
A fine control is provided for the dithering that occurs during color and shading alterations, including the ability to generate halftone dithering.
Recently support for seam carving (content-aware image resizing) ("liquid rescaling" of images) has been added. This feature allows, for example, rescaling 4:3 images into 16:9 images without distorting the image.
ImageMagick includes a variety of filters and features intended to create artistic effects:
ImageMagick can use OpenCL to use an accelerated graphics card (GPU) for processing.[3]
Below are just a few other examples of what ImageMagick can do:
ImageMagick is cross-platform, and runs on Microsoft Windows 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 and MorphOS.
GraphicsMagick is a fork of ImageMagick 5.5.2 made in 2002, emphasizing the cross-release stability of the programming API and user interface. GraphicsMagick emerged after irreconcilable differences emerged in the developers' group.[4]