- Hardcover: 330 pages
- Publisher: APRESS ACADEMIC (1 Dec 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1590595904
- ISBN-13: 978-1590595909
- Product Dimensions: 23.7 x 18.4 x 2.9 cm
- Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,148,231 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (Definitive Guides)
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Product Description
Product Description
An open source project backed by years of continual development, ImageMagick supports over 90 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 photos 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. You’ll get comfortable using ImageMagick for any image-processing task. Through the books coverage of the ImageMagick interfaces for C, Perl, PHP, and Ruby, you’ll learn how to incorporate ImageMagick features into a variety of applications.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
We really don't need chapters in this day and age devoted to compiling such tool sets any more. Practically every distribution out there will have it's own system of installing binaries. If you want to learn how to compile ImageMagick you are very unlikely to either need a book or have a book as your first port of call. I was really hoping, having bought this direct as a PDF, for a guide to cover the woeful documentation for MagickWand and MagickCore in C. Even something covering MagickWand under PHP would have been useful enough for me as a C coder.
On the ImageMagick website the functions are described well enough but not what the parameters to them are, for example:
MagickBooleanType MagickEvaluateImages(MagickWand *wand,
const MagickEvaluateOperator operator)
Yet nothing explaining what MagickEvaluateOperator is or how to construct one. The book does not even mention *most* of the operators available to you and only barely covers perl and ruby. The sum total of pages devoted to C? 6. Focussing on writing a standalone plugin to ImageMagick converting a PNG to (cough) ASCII art with AALib.
If you want a book covering the basics of image manipulation from a nothing at all to do with ImageMagick per se perspective alongside a book covering extensively (~200pages) the command line ImageMagick stuff this book may well satisfy a need but is definitely NOT worth the asking price and I only paid £[].
On the ImageMagick website the functions are described well enough but not what the parameters to them are, for example:
MagickBooleanType MagickEvaluateImages(MagickWand *wand,
const MagickEvaluateOperator operator)
Yet nothing explaining what MagickEvaluateOperator is or how to construct one. The book does not even mention *most* of the operators available to you and only barely covers perl and ruby. The sum total of pages devoted to C? 6. Focussing on writing a standalone plugin to ImageMagick converting a PNG to (cough) ASCII art with AALib.
If you want a book covering the basics of image manipulation from a nothing at all to do with ImageMagick per se perspective alongside a book covering extensively (~200pages) the command line ImageMagick stuff this book may well satisfy a need but is definitely NOT worth the asking price and I only paid £[].
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Admittedly, I've only skimmed this book before returning it, but I was very disappointed. Rather than a definitive reference it's merely a beginners' introduction to IM, and deeply compromised even in that by having all its illustrations and photos in murky black and white. I learned far more from the online documentation (such as it is), and this book was no help at all on the more complex issues I wanted to investigate.
It wastes a whole chapter on compilation and installation, a matter that concerned me for about 5 seconds, and another on writing your own 'delegates' in C!
I could go on, but it's enough to say - don't buy it! I just wish I'd paid more attention to the online text (some of which you can read for free on Google books). A turkey. Avoid.
It wastes a whole chapter on compilation and installation, a matter that concerned me for about 5 seconds, and another on writing your own 'delegates' in C!
I could go on, but it's enough to say - don't buy it! I just wish I'd paid more attention to the online text (some of which you can read for free on Google books). A turkey. Avoid.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
56 of 57 people found the following review helpful
Better than nothing, but disappointing
5 Jan 2006
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
35 of 36 people found the following review helpful
Disappointing. Needs Color & more emphasis on Perl & APIs
18 Jan 2006
Format:Hardcover
This was disappointing. The emphasis of the book is on the ImageMagick commandline tools rather than the APIs. There are a lot of photographs but they're all black and white. The before and after samples are worse than useless - they just take up space. It's probably not the Author's fault.
Apress (the publishers) should really have done this book properly and included glossy color pages where needed. As it stands, it's impossible to tell from looking at the before-and-after photos in the book, what most of the image operations are supposed to do. This is just cheap on the part of the publishers.
Stick to the online imagemagick tutorials and give this book a miss.
Apress (the publishers) should really have done this book properly and included glossy color pages where needed. As it stands, it's impossible to tell from looking at the before-and-after photos in the book, what most of the image operations are supposed to do. This is just cheap on the part of the publishers.
Stick to the online imagemagick tutorials and give this book a miss.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Nice Introduction To ImageMagick
7 Jun 2006
Format:Hardcover
'The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick' by Michael Still is a nice guide which covers an extremely powerful set of tools that is lacking in documentation. Note that I say the word 'nice' and not GREAT. I wanted this to be great, I truly did. I use ImageMagick on a nearly daily basis and while I thought I knew I knew the ins and outs of this application pretty well, I was hoping that I could get some more out of this book, the only one of its kind on the market that I knew of.
Problem #1 NO COLOR IMAGES!!!!
How can you have a guide that covers manipulating and using images and provide no color examples when there are tons of other books the get away from the 3 colors of white, black and grey?? I realize that this was a decision made by the higher ups at Apress and it's a bad, bad, bad decision
Problem #2 At just over 300 pages and with some images (again, black and white) and cover nearly and entire page in size, this guide is certainly not DEFINITIVE. If you want to make a definitive guide, you need to have more content, more content, more content. More like 'An Introduction to ImageMagick' would be the more appropriate title.
If you are new to ImageMagick and want to see what can be done, this is a handy guide but any power users won't get a lot out of this book. The examples are handy, but the decision to have no color photos really hurts this text even as an introduction to the technology. Apress, you want some advice for version 2??? Get out the Crayola box!!
**** RECOMMENDED
Problem #1 NO COLOR IMAGES!!!!
How can you have a guide that covers manipulating and using images and provide no color examples when there are tons of other books the get away from the 3 colors of white, black and grey?? I realize that this was a decision made by the higher ups at Apress and it's a bad, bad, bad decision
Problem #2 At just over 300 pages and with some images (again, black and white) and cover nearly and entire page in size, this guide is certainly not DEFINITIVE. If you want to make a definitive guide, you need to have more content, more content, more content. More like 'An Introduction to ImageMagick' would be the more appropriate title.
If you are new to ImageMagick and want to see what can be done, this is a handy guide but any power users won't get a lot out of this book. The examples are handy, but the decision to have no color photos really hurts this text even as an introduction to the technology. Apress, you want some advice for version 2??? Get out the Crayola box!!
**** RECOMMENDED
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