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

Compression versus Quality


In all the samples provided in this book we just follow a bunch of commands and set some options in them without considering factors like size, quality, and compression.

In this appendix we will take a look at the options that ImageMagick has provided for them and some hints about the best way to select an image format for our work and compress it using a suitable algorithm.

The goal of image compression is reducing the size of an image so it can be saved using less space and can be read faster especially when we are dealing with online image processing tasks.

But it definitely has its costs. By compressing an image we reduce its quality. It is up to you as a user to choose the right format and compression scheme to achieve a good balance between quality and compression. Let us see what capabilities we can find in ImageMagick for handling these issues.