GraphicsMagick Image Processing System

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# GraphicsMagick Image Processing System

Legacy Stable Branch: | 1.1.14 (Released June 5, 2008) download
Previous Stable Branch: | 1.2.6 (Released November 17, 2008) download
Current StableBranch: | 1.3.3 (Released December 9, 2008) download

Check http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ for the latest version of this page.

GraphicsMagick is the swiss army knife of image processing. Comprised of 337K lines of C and C++ code, it provides a robust and efficient collection of tools and libraries which support reading, writing, and manipulating an image in over 88 major formats including important formats like DPX, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PNG, PDF, PNM, and TIFF. GraphicsMagick supports huge images on systems that support large files, and has been tested with gigapixel-size images. GraphicsMagick can create new images on the fly, making it suitable for building dynamic Web applications. GraphicsMagick may be used to resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image and save the result in the same or differing image format. Image processing operations are available from the command line, as well as through C, C++, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, or Windows COM programming interfaces. With some modification, language extensions for ImageMagick may be used.

GraphicsMagick is originally derived from ImageMagick 5.5.2 but has been completely independent of the ImageMagick project since then. Since the fork from ImageMagick in 2002, many improvements have been made (see news) by many authors using an open development model but without breaking the API or utilities operation.

Here are some reasons to prefer GraphicsMagick over ImageMagick:

> - GM is much more efficient (see the benchmarks) so it gets the job done faster using fewer resources.
> - GM is much smaller and tighter.
> - GM does not use generic names for its utilities so it does not conflict with other installed software (including system tools.)
> - GM comes with a comprehensive manual page.
> - GM provides API and ABI stability and managed releases that you can count on.
> - GM provides detailed human-readable ChangeLog and NEWS files.
> - GM is available for free, may be used to support both open and proprietary applications, and may be redistributed without fee.
> - GM is dististributed under an X11-style license ("MIT License"), which is approved by the Open Source Initiative and declared by the FSF to be compatible with the GPL Version 2.

GraphicsMagick is copyrighted by the GraphicsMagick Group as well as many others.

Here are just a few examples of what GraphicsMagick can do:

> - Convert an image from one format to another (e.g. TIFF to JPEG)
> - Resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image
> - Create a montage of image thumbnails
> - Create a transparent image suitable for use on the Web
> - Turn a group of images into a GIF animation sequence
> - Create a composite image by combining several separate images
> - Draw shapes or text on an image
> - Decorate an image with a border or frame
> - Describe the format and characteristics of an image

GraphicsMagick is quite portable, and compiles under almost every general purpose operating system that runs on 32-bit or 64-bit CPUs. GraphicsMagick is available for virtually any Unix or Unix-like system, including Linux. It also runs under Windows '98 and later ('98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, and XP), and MacOS-X.

Major developments which appeared in GraphicsMagick 1.3:

> - Algorithms are re-written so that they are accelerated via OpenMP. OpenMP allows you to take advantage of those extra cores in your multi-core/multi-CPU system in order to dramatically reduce processing time.
> - Additional operators are added for tasks like thresholding, gamma correction, and adding noise.

Major developments which appeared in GraphicsMagick 1.2:

> - Stellar support for SMPTE DPX format as used by the motion picture industry for film frames. Read about it!
> - TIFF format support is completely re-written to support all subformats, an arbitrary number of sample bits, floating point types, and improved performance.
> - Support for ITU Rec.601 and Rec.709 colorspaces (RGB and Luma).
> - A huge number of bug fixes, performance improvements, and minor features.

Copyright © GraphicsMagick Group 2002 - 2008