The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (Definitive Guide)

The sheer weight of helpful content makes this an invaluable purchase for Linux users at all levels.

— Paul Hudson, Linux Format

An open source project backed by years of continual development, ImageMagick supports over ninety image formats and can perform impressive operations such as creating images from scratch; changing colors; stretching, rotating, and overlaying images; and overlaying text on images. Whether you use ImageMagick to manage the family photographs or to embark on a job involving millions of images, this book will provide you with the knowledge to manage your images with ease.

The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick explains all of these capabilities and more in a practical, learn-by-example fashion. Youll get comfortable using ImageMagick for any image-processing task. Through the books coverage of the ImageMagick interfaces for C, Perl, PHP, and Ruby, youll learn how to incorporate ImageMagick features into a variety of applications.

About The Author
Michael Still released his first open source project in July 2000 and has been actively developing ever since. He has had a variety of articles published by IBM DeveloperWorks, and once made a tux out of fairy lights! He is the author of the recently published The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (Apress, 2005). Michael grew up in Canberra, Australia, and now works for Google and lives in the Silicon Valley with his wife and two kids. Michael is a past committee member of AUUG, Linux Australia, and the linux.conf.au 2005 committee.

Reader Reviews
ImageMagick is an extremely powerful, free, command-line image editor that has been around a while and is the preferred tool of many for dynamically creating images for the web. However, like many open-source projects, ImageMagick's weakness has always been poor documentation. So I was excited when I saw there was finally a guide to ImageMagick, and ordered the book hot off the presses. I have to say, though, I'm disappointed. I was hoping for a book with a good command reference, tips and tricks, sample uses, and that sort of thing. Instead, it is a very basic introduction to ImageMagick. The book is very graphical in nature, with about 75% of virtually every page filled by an image, and only a little text. The images, while a little useful, are probably larger than they need to be, and almost seem to be filler making up for the lack of text. They are also all black and white images, which makes them in some cases useless (i.e. "Figure 6-29. Alcatraz with varying levels of hue" depicts 4 essentially identical images - without color, you can't tell that one has less hue than another). For a book of this price, I would expect color photos. As a result, the book feels very sparse, with little information on each page. The last few chapters, which show code examples of how to use ImageMagick in several popular programming languages, are more in line with the sort of practical examples I was expecting, although this section feels short. So overall, a decent *introduction* to ImageMagick, but I think calling it "Definitive" is a bit undeserved. It is the only game in town though, since for some reason no one else has written a book on ImageMagick. If you have already used ImageMagick, this book is only marginally useful. I'll have to keep hoping O'Reilly does one, and does it right. Comment | | (Report this)