More on ImageMagick

I've talked about ImageMagick before, and I figured it would be fun to cover some more features available with it. The reason I like ImageMagick is that it is really convenient for when you want to do the same thing to a large group of pictures. You may find yourself with some digital pictures that you want to make look more artsy by changing them to black and white or maybe to a sepia tone.

The first thing I always do before using ImageMagick is to make backup copies of all my pictures I'm going to be editing. Once you're ready to get started, converting pictures to black and white is really easy:

$ mogrify -monochrome input.jpg

It really is that simple. The above will only convert the image named input.jpg. If you wanted to do the same thing to all .jpg images in a directory, you could do this:

$ mogrify -monochrome *.jpg

Sepia tone allows for a little more tweaking, because it allows you to input a threshold as a percent of the intensity, ranging from 0 - 99.9%. This is something that you would want to play with to get the desired result, but from my experience 80% is usually a good starting point. We could convert an image to sepia tone like this:

$ mogrify -sepia-tone 80% input.jpg

Again, you could use the same command on all .jgp images in a directory:

$ mogrify -sepia-tone 80% *.jpg

This still only scratches the surface of what you can do with ImageMagick. I'll be covering more of the features in future posts.

See you next time