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This chapter hasn’t been the most exciting chapter that you’ll read in the book, but it’s an important one, because it shows you how to get ImageMagick installed on your machines. Now that you have ImageMagick installed, you can move onto the much more interesting aspects of ImageMagick, such as Chapter 2, which talks about changing the size of images and making thumbnails; Chapter 3, which talks about how to convert images between different compression formats; and Chapter 5, which shows how to apply some fantastic visual effects to your images.

If you need more details for the instructions in this chapter, then I recommend you refer to Chapter 12, which covers more details about how to get help online, where the various ImageMagick community resources are, and where to find the Web site for this book, which is where I’ll post any errata and changes to the build process as I learn about them.

In this chapter, I discussed some the basic image manipulations that you can perform with ImageMagick. All these transformations involve changing the size of images—be that making them larger or smaller. I also talked about the differences between raster and vector images and about some of the issues associated with resizing raster images.

In the next chapter, you’ll look at how to change the file format used to store an image, how to change the parameters used by the compression algorithm used for a given image, and how to change other metadata associated with the image. In later chapters, I’ll discuss other interesting topics such as the artistic transformations that you can apply to images, how to create images from scratch with ImageMagick drawing commands, and how to handle animations.

In this chapter, you looked at how to change the compression of an image, the attributes of the compression of an image, or even the entire format of the image. You also learned how to handle multiple image formats such as TIFF and PDF, including creating them, removing single images from them, and swapping images within them. Finally, I talked about the ultimate in multiple image formats—animations.

In the next chapter, I’ll cover some of the other ImageMagick command-line tools before presenting some of the more artistic transformations that ImageMagick can perform on an image.

In this chapter, you looked at the various command-line and graphical tools that ImageMagick provides. The convert command is the focus of most of this book, so refer to other chapters for more information about it. Specifically, see Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 5, and Chapter 6.

ImageMagick can perform a lot of useful functions with the commands it provides, including creating montages of images with a large variety of formatting options, displaying your images for you, capturing windows from your X Windows session, and displaying images as the background in those windows on your X session. ImageMagick can perform many functions that aren’t covered by the convert command, and this chapter has shown you a few of them. I could show you other details about these commands, but it would take hundreds of pages to do so. I recommend you refer to the ImageMagick documentation at http://www.imagemagick.org if you need more specific details of a command that you’ve seen in this chapter.

The next chapter shows you some of the more artistic transformations that ImageMagick can perform, and Chapter 6 shows you the remainder of the image transformations ImageMagick offers. Chapter 7 covers how to draw on existing images and create new images with ImageMagick; then I’ll move introduce four examples of programmer interfaces to ImageMagick, so read on for more details.

In this chapter, I covered some of the artistic transformations that ImageMagick lets you apply to images. Read on for information on the remaining operations I haven’t covered yet, including other image transformations, drawing facilities, and various programming interfaces.

In this chapter, I covered all the remaining image transformations available from ImageMagick. If you combine all the preceding chapters with this one, you can see that ImageMagick can certainly do a lot for you in the imaging field. Its versatility doesn’t stop there, though—you can use a number of programmatic interfaces to implement the ImageMagick functionality. The next chapter covers how to annotate existing images and create new images using the ImageMagick drawing facilities. Chapters 8 through 11 will focus on four popular programming interfaces to ImageMagick.

This is the last chapter in this book that deals with the ImageMagick command line, and you’ve come a long way throughout these seven chapters. In this chapter, I discussed the various ImageMagick drawing commands, which let you modify existing images and create new images. ImageMagick can perform a lot of cool operations on images from the command line, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the last seven chapters. They should form a useful reference for your future use of the command-line tools.

The next four chapters focus on examples of programmer interfaces to ImageMagick, so you’ll need to know something about coding to get much utility from those chapters. If you’re a programmer, you’ll get to see how to use different aspects of ImageMagick in Perl, C, Ruby, and PHP. Finally, I’ll finish off the book with a chapter on where to go from what’s covered in this book.

In this chapter, I presented a full demonstration of how to write a CGI and command-line application using Perl and ImageMagick’s PerlMagick. In the next three chapters, I’ll demonstrate three more examples of applications using ImageMagick-one in C, one in Ruby, and one in PHP. These demonstrations don’t intend to show off all that is possible in these programming interfaces, as was done in the command-line discussion, but instead intend to present useful techniques and examples.

This chapter showed you a useful technique for implementing your own delegates. The next two chapters cover how to use Ruby and PHP with ImageMagick, both in the form of Web interfaces.

In this chapter, you saw an example of how to use ImageMagick with the RMagick Ruby interface. I showed you how to write a helper application that assists the user in deciding which transformations to apply to a group of images and then applies those transformations to the selected set of images. The sample application in this chapter was by no means complete, but it shows you the skeletal structure of what a more complete application would look like, without a lot of code getting in the way. Note that the Ruby programming language provides an expressive, powerful interface to ImageMagick, without bogging you down with having to write a lot of code.

In the remaining two chapters of the book, you’ll examine one last programming interface—this time for PHP—and then find out where to go from what’s covered in this book.