The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick
Like many other open source software products ImageMagick has always suffered from poor documentation. That problem is helped considerably with the publication of The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick. For those who are used to working with fancy graphical interfaces ImageMagick will be quite a shock. It uses a command line interface which makes it easy to use put into your own programs and simply call or build the appropriate command line to produce the desired results. This book is designed for those readers who want to get right to work with the command-line tools or writing code to take advantage of the programming interface. Because of the ability of the software to make complex adjustments to images through the command line this book clearly demonstrates how to make quick changes without opening large complex programs. Some of the areas covered include resizing, changing compressions, blurring, charcoal effects, adding noise, and dithering. The last few chapters concentrate on programming with ImageMagick and Perl, C, Ruby, and PHP. A command line graphics program is not for everyone and especially so with all the powerful graphics programs available on the market today. However, if you want to write your own graphic transformation program or include that ability in your own interface then this is one of the easiest ways to implement it and The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick is the best documentation available for this product. That does not mean it could not be better. It could be much better and there are a lot of abilities that are not covered in much detail, but it is still the best documentation I have seen.
Author: Michael Still
Publisher: Apress
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 219
Berkeley, CA 94710
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 1590595904
Pages: 320 plus index
Price: $49.95