I want to overlay multiple PNG images of different sizes on a transparent canvas using ImageMagick. First I create a transparent canvas of some fixed size, say like
convert -size 1500x1000 canvas:transparent PNG32:canvas.png
Then I loop over my images in order to add each image to the canvas
convert canvas.png nthimage.png -gravity Center -geometry xResxYres+xcoord+ycoord -composite canvas.png
This works fine, but I may overlay as many as 10 pictures and I do this for thousands of n-tuples of images, so a faster solution would be appreciated. So my question: Can I also do this in one step instead of creating the canvas first and then adding a single image at a time?
Edit: I use ImageMagick 7.0.11-13 on macOS 10.15.7. I run ImageMagick from within a python script, so a file containing a list of input files can be generated if needed. For concreteness, say my input files are file_1.png up to file_n.png with sizes A1xB1 up to AnxBn and should be placed at coordinates +X1+Y1 up to +Xn+Yn with respect to the center of the canvas and the output file is output.png and should have size 1500x1000.
I really wouldn't recommend shelling out subprocesses from Python to call ImageMagick thousands of times. You'll just end up including too much process creation overhead per image, which is pointless if you are already running Python which can do the image processing "in house".
I would suggest you use PIL, or OpenCV directly from Python, and as your Mac is certainly multi-core, I would suggest you use multi-processing too since the task of doing thousands of images is trivially parallelisable.
As you haven't really given any indication of what your tuples actually look like, nor how to determine the output filename, I can only point you to methods 7 & 8 in this answer.
Your processing function for each image will want to create a new transparent image then open and paste other images with:
from PIL import Image
canvas = Image.new('RGBA', SOMETHING)
for overlay in overlays:
im = Image.open(overlay)
canvas.paste(im, (SOMEWHERE))
canvas.save(something)
Documentation here.
I am trying to read a medical imaging data which is in .tif format using Octave . It so happens that only software from https://fiji.sc/ has the ability to read the medical images I have. A sample of the image that I am referring is this one. This image is readable in.tif format only in fiji. The image can also be converted to jpg image. Only after data points is visible to other image editing software. Now the issue is , I want to load it into octave and read it - at the moment it is not possible. The imshow() function in octave is not allowing me to visualize the given .tif file.
So, if anybody has experience in reading such file formats please let me know. Thanks.
Your linked image is a 16bit grayscale image, see $ gm identify -verbose hello.tif. So lets load it into GNU Octave:
img = imread ("hello.tif");
hist (img(:), 200); # show histogram
Ah!, the main information of your image is in the range 0-600 (probably the image aquisition system used had 11 or 12bit resolution), so lets scale and print this part as color encoded (viridis) image:
imagesc (img, [0 600])
colorbar
Is this what you want? Of course we can also use a gray colormap, try: colormap gray
If this still doesn't fit your need you should really explain what you expect to see....
imread() relies on image magic to do the conversion, some versions of which can only read TIFF in 8-bit mode (giving a warning message), but when and how this happens I do not know.
It works for me using a .raw ṕicture converted to .tif in Fiji. I am specifically interested in several spectral analysis from my pictures which are taken illuminating with 660 and 850nm.
I'm trying to edit a pdf file with 100 pages, all of them images I need to export as png, setting their image mode as greyscale, and setting also their resolution, width and heigth.
How can I write a scheme (or python) script that perform this actions so that i could apply them by gimp in batch mode?
I've searched in the internet but didn't find simpy stated instructions.
ImageMagick's convert will do all this in one call in a command prompt:
convert -density 200 -colorspace Gray input.pdf -geometry 1000 ouput.png
will produce 1000px-wide grayscale PNGs (output-0 to output-(N-1).png) using a 200DPI rendering of the PDF.
You can also use Gimp scripting but you'll have a lot more to learn and AFAIK the API for the PDF loader only loads at 100DPI.
A slightly more manual method could be to:
Load (manually) the image in Gimp (you can specifiy the DPI in that case). This loads all the pages as layers.
Image>Mode>RGB to convert the image to grayscale.
Image>Scale image to set the size of all the pages
Save the individual layers to PNG (there are scripts for this, for instance this one)
For a dynamic imaging application I'm building, I have to take an image created by a rendering package and place it in an InDesign file. Because it needs to be CMYK with transparency, TIFF is the only possible format to use. The difficulty I'm having is that the renderer is generating an image with an unassociated alpha channel, which InDesign seems to have trouble understanding.
I'm working with the renderer manufacturer to see if they can change their output format, but in the mean time I would like to find some automated workflow to convert a CMYK TIFF with unassociated alpha to have associated (premultiplied) alpha.
I tried using GraphicsMagick's command-line tool (which would be easily scriptable), but the closest I could get simply forced the TIFF flag to get written as premultiplied--it didn't actually perform the premultiplication. The effect is a working alpha but with washed out color:
gm -convert <infile> -define tiff:alpha=associated <outfile>
Does anybody have other suggestions on how to achieve this conversion? My primary requirement is that it needs to be automatable in a Linux server environment, ideally via either scripting or a PHP library (since that's already being used elsewhere in the workflow), but I'm flexible on the PHP bit.
Edit:
For reference here are the two files (42MB each):
Original TIFF with unassociated alpha
Modified TIFF from GM with pseudo-associated alpha and washed out color
I'm looking for software to create PNG8 format transparent images as per this article.
NOTE: I need a Linux solution myself, but please submit answers for other OSes.
pngquant does a good job of converting to PNG8 while preserving full transparency.
If you're size-conscious, you may also be interested in pngcrush, which can usually (losslessly) compress PNG files quite a bit.
I also needed a Linux solution and found pngnq to do a pretty good job. It seems to be designed specifically for creating 8-bit PNG images with alpha channels.
apt-get install pngnq # If on Ubuntu/Debian
For Mac: ImageOptim and ImageAlpha are GUIs that run pngcrush, pngquant, and various other normally command-line compression utilities. http://pngmini.com/
The link you provided references ImageMagick, which is an excellent toolkit for manipulating images on Linux.
Ah, if I remember correctly, when I have read this article some months ago, pngquant hadn't a Windows version. I see it has one now. So I tried it, and pngnq too.
The latter seems to do a slightly better job on the IceAlpha.png test image (from libpng.org), at the cost of a slightly bigger image (it can be post-processed with pngcrush or pngout anyway).
The dithering algorithms (the two of pngquant, the only one of pngnq) are different, and it might be worth having both tools, converting images with all algorithms and see what looks the best.
For the record, on the Windows side, IrfanView (4.10) displays these images very well (using the transparency level on each palette entry) while XnView (1.85.1) and GIMP (2.4) apply only a full transparency/opaque display, à la GIF: the light bulb given as an example in the linked article has a transparent background around it, but the orange part is fully opaque.
And the excellent utility TweakPNG shows we have a PLTE (palette, 222 entries) chunk and a tRNS (alpha values for palette colors, 222 entries) chunk. Even more, it allows to edit each palette entry, color and alpha level. It might be an interesting complementary tool for this format.
Note on IrfanView support: if it handles PNG8 correctly for transparency, it doesn't handle gamma information in PNG files: on the toucan image or the ping-pong image, I had to apply a gamma of 2.4 to get similar (lighter) colors.
Note also that IrfanView does an awful job of converting 32-bit PNG images to 256, allowing only one transparent color, which looks bad if full color was dithered!
I see that the GIMP manual states: "his “PNG8” format, like GIF, uses only one bit for transparency; only two transparency levels are possible, transparent or opaque. "
while the ISO/W3C standard states:
"The tRNS chunk specifies either alpha values that are associated with palette entries (for indexed-colour images) or a single transparent colour (for greyscale and truecolour images).". The PNG specification 1.2 added: "Although simple transparency is not as elegant as the full alpha channel, it requires less storage space and is sufficient for many common cases."
It looks like the unique transparent color is more implemented than the full transparency palette, alas. At least browsers get it right.
It depends on what exactly your original images look like.
If your images already contain 256 or fewer colors (RGBA values), you need only look at pngout (Windows) (Linux/BSD/Mac OS X ports), which you should already be using to optimize your PNG images anyway. It can't quantize images, but it can save them as 8-bit, including alpha transparency. Just pass in the /c3 (or -c3 on Linux et al.) color option to force it to save the image as PNG8.
If your images do contain more than 256 colors, you have a few more, but all less than perfect options:
Adobe Fireworks is probably the best option in terms of the resulting image quality. It will do the job if you only need to convert a few images, or if you don't mind relying on Fireworks to do the batch processing. I did find that it sometimes somehow limits the number of colors in the palette, creating a worse quality image than necessary. I don't know if that's perhaps a bug in CS3 that's been fixed in CS4.
If you're not on Windows or OS X this obviously isn't an option, and buying Fireworks just for this probably isn't worth it either.
The only alternatives I know of are the already mentioned pngquant and pngnq. I've had better luck with pngnq, but that's probably just going to depend on which quantization strategy works best on the files you're working with.
Unfortunately, I've noticed that neither of them work very well with small amounts of transparency (say, an opaque image with transparent, rounded corners).
I recommend "The GIMP" as it is possible to output in PNG8 and supports Linux/Windows. If you want a quick Windows-only solution, I also recommend IrfanView.
Microsoft Windows: Ultimate Paint (freeware and shareware
versions are available).
Both versions can save as an 8 bit transparent PNG image.
It can also save as a 4 bit PNG (16 colours). This cuts the
file size in half compared to 8 bit.
Input formats include BMP, GIF, ICO, JPG/JPEG and PNG.
The freeware edition of Ultimate Paint Standard 2.88 LE can
be downloaded directly from
http://www.ultimatepaint.com/up.zip (1.7 MB).