Book Image

ImageMagick Tricks

By : Sohail Salehi
Book Image

ImageMagick Tricks

By: Sohail Salehi

Overview of this book

<p>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 &acirc;&euro;&ldquo; carrying out complex image-manipulation tasks in response to the user's input.<br /><br />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.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
ImageMagick Tricks
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
5
Identify, Display, and Import
Index

How to Create an Animation


As I mentioned before, the animate utility just shows animated files. So the best way of creating animation files is the convert utility. The easiest manner of making an animation with convert is to join the still images in a directory (which have the same format) and save them as an animated format like .gif, .mpg, .m2v, or .mnv.

convert *.jpg animated.mpg

This command places all the .jpg files in the current directory (in alphabetical order) as frames of an animated .mpg file. If you play the .mpg file, the frames will show rapidly and the animation will loop from the start. Using the above command, the dimensions of the animated .mpg file that is created is based on the first image page size and all the other .jpg files will be aligned to the upper left corner of the created canvas.

Questions like what happens if the .jpg files have various dimensions, how will the small images align to the animation frame, how to slow down the play-back and issues like play...