Unleash the power of ImageMagick with this fast, friendly tutorial and tips guide
- Complete tutorial and a gallery of tricks and techniques
- Create impressive image manipulations and animations on-the-fly from the command line or within your programs
- Complete PHP-based sample applications show how to use ImageMagick to add pizzazz your web site
In Detail The book is packed with interesting and fun examples. We had a lot of fun coming up with cool ways to demonstrate ImageMagick's power, and we're sure you'll have fun learning how to create them.
Although the printed book is in black and white, there is a full colour PDF of the screenshots freely available that includes all of the images in the book. Use it to see exactly what the ImageMagick effects look like in colour, or browse through it and see just what you'll learn to do with this book.
ImageMagick is a free software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images using text-based commands. The commands can be issued from the command line, but more often will be included in web or desktop applications - carrying out complex image-manipulation tasks in response to the user's input.
ImageMagick is a popular way for generating images on-the-fly in web pages, whether it's generating thumbnails from a large image, or creating complex combinations of images, text, and effects chosen by a visitor or the web site's creator.
What you will learn from this book?
- Understand what ImageMagick can do and why you will want to use it
- Install the ImageMagick software on your own computer or a server, and understand your way around it
- Create exciting text effects and produce eye catching logos and headings for use in your pages or applications
- Slice, dice, and filter your images turn simple photos into mind-bending designs and illusions
- Create thumbnails by converting file types, resizing, and cropping to consistent size, aspect ratio, and format. Or create complete image catalogues with thumbnails, file names, and information combined in a single image.
- Make your images look 3D with clever application of blurs, displacements, and masks
- Extract information from your files such as size, compression levels, and source information
- Use ImageMagick to create GIF animations, from simple slideshows to gradual morphs and effects
- Generate ImageMagick scripts in MSL using the conjure utility
- Write web applications such as an advanced e-card generator, and even create your own Packt book cover!
- Crystal clear explanations - this might be Magick, but there's no smoke and mirrors!
Approach
Sohail Salehi is an experienced computer graphics artist, working with 2D, 3D, and video graphics. The book shows his techniques in action. This is no laborious walk through of ImageMagick, with one dull example after another. The chapters consist of workshops, each one applying a set of ImageMagick commands to produce surprising and exciting results. As you read the book, you will learn the features of ImageMagick as well as getting lots of inspiration and ideas for how you can use it in your own projects. You'll be amazed by the creative results you can achieve using code.
