ImageMagick

Description
What's New
How You Can Help
ImageMagick Archives
Other Information Sources

Description

ImageMagick ^TM, version 3.7.7, is a package for display and interactive manipulation of images for the X Window System. It is written in C and interfaces to the X library, and therefore does not require any proprietary toolkit in order to compile. Although the software is copyrighted, it is available for free and can be redistributed without fee.

The ImageMagick image display tool first determines the hardware capabilities of your workstation. If the number of unique colors in an image is less than or equal to the number the workstation can support, the image is displayed in an X window. Otherwise, the number of colors in the image is first reduced to match the color resolution of the workstation before it is displayed.

In addition to the image display program, ImageMagick also has command line programs that perform these functions:

Describe the format and characteristics of an image

Convert an image from one format to another

Transform an image or sequence of images

Read an image from an X server and output it as an image file

Animate a sequence of images

Combine one or more images to create new images

Create a composite image by combining several separate images

Segment an image based on the color histogram

Retrieve, list, or print files from a remote network site

You can try these and many more functions over the Internet from the Imaging Machine . Or, you can see examples of select ImageMagick functions.

ImageMagick supports many of the more popular image formats including JPEG, PNG, TIFF, Photo CD, etc.

ImageMagick is known to compile and run on virtually any Unix system and Linux. It also runs under VMS. See README for compiling instructions.

What's New

ImageMagick is continually being enhanced. Check this section periodically to see what enhancements have been added. See Changelog for past enhancements and bug fixes.

Display has a new command Miscellany->Show Preview. This function allows you to preview the effects of different image operators at varying scales.
Display nows supports the DndProtocols for drag-n-drop.
Added a new format, GRADATION, to gradually pass from one shade to another (e.g. convert gradation:red-blue shaded.miff).
A subimage specification can now be disjoint (e.g. image.tiff[2,4,7]).
ImageMagick no longer requires the XPM library to read or write the XPM image format.
Join the ImageMagick mailing list. Send subscribe magick to majordomo@wizards.dupont.com.
There is a limited capability version of ImageMagick for the Macintosh.
ImageMagick is now fully ANSI C compliant and will compile with any C++ compiler. K & R compilers will no longer compile ImageMagick.
You can now compile ImageMagick on Posix systems without the X11 libraries. Use the X11 Stubs libraries instead.

How You Can Help

I volunteer my time to develop and maintain ImageMagick. However, I can't do it alone. I am looking for other volunteers to help make ImageMagick even better. Here is a list of tasks you can do to contribute to this effort:

Contribute a binary distribution of ImageMagick for NT, Win95, Unixware, FreeBSD, etc. Let me know if any patches are required to compile on any of these computers.
Write a program that calls the ImageMagick ReadImage routine and displays the image in a window on the Macintosh.
Port ReadPICTImage in decode.c to read PICT images on the Macintosh.
Port ReadPSImage in decode.c to interface with Ghostscript on the Macintosh.
Improve the ImageMagick documentation. The most useful improvement would be a HTML section that describes how to perform some of the more useful ImageMagick functions with actual images to illustrate the results.
Send me bug reports or any suggestions you have for improving ImageMagick.