ImageMagick

Last updated

ImageMagick
Original author(s) John Cristy
Developer(s) ImageMagick Studio LLC
Initial releaseAugust 1, 1990;33 years ago (1990-08-01) [1]
Stable release
7.1.1-23 [2]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 11 December 2023
Repository
Written in C
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Image manipulation
License ImageMagick [3]
Website imagemagick.org OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
ImageMagick License [3]
AuthorImageMagick Studio LLC
SPDX identifierImageMagick [4]
Debian FSG compatible Yes
GPL compatible Yes
Linking from code with a different licence Yes
Website imagemagick.org OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

ImageMagick, invoked from the command line as magick, is a free and open-source [3] cross-platform software suite for displaying, creating, converting, modifying, and editing raster images. ImageMagick was created by John Cristy in 1987, it can read and write over 200 image file formats. It is widely used in open-source applications.

Contents

History

ImageMagick was created in 1987 by John Cristy when working at DuPont, to convert 24-bit images (16 million colors) to 8-bit images (256 colors), so they could be displayed on most screens at the time. It was freely released in 1990 when DuPont agreed to transfer copyright to ImageMagick Studio LLC, still currently the project maintainer organization. [5] [6] [7]

In May 2016, it was reported that ImageMagick had a vulnerability through which an attacker can execute arbitrary code on servers that use the application to edit user-uploaded images. [8] Security researchers at Cloudflare observed use of the vulnerability in active hacking attempts. [9] The security flaw was due to ImageMagick calling backend tools without first properly checking to ensure path and file names are free of improper shell commands. [10] The vulnerability did not affect ImageMagick distributions that included a properly configured security policy.[ citation needed ]

Features and capabilities

The software mainly consists of a number of command-line interface utilities for manipulating images. ImageMagick does not have a robust graphical user interface to edit images as do Adobe Photoshop and GIMP, but does include – for Unix-like operating systems – a basic native X Window GUI (called IMDisplay) for rendering and manipulating images and API libraries for many programming languages. The program uses magic numbers to identify image file formats.

A number of programs, such as Drupal, MediaWiki, phpBB, and vBulletin, can use ImageMagick to create image thumbnails if installed. ImageMagick is also used by other programs, such as LyX, for converting images.

ImageMagick has a fully integrated Perl binding called PerlMagick, [11] as well as many others: G2F (Ada), MagickCore (C), MagickWand (C), ChMagick (Ch), ImageMagickObject (COM+), Magick++ (C++), JMagick (Java), L-Magick (Lisp), NMagick (Neko/Haxe), MagickNet (.NET), PascalMagick (Pascal), MagickWand for PHP (PHP), IMagick (PHP), PythonMagick (Python), RMagick (Ruby), and TclMagick (Tcl/Tk).

File format conversion

One of the basic and thoroughly-implemented features of ImageMagick is its ability to efficiently and accurately convert images between different file formats (it uses the command convert to achieve this).

Color quantization

The number of colors in an image can be reduced to an arbitrary number by weighing the most prominent color values present among the pixels of the image.

A related capability is the posterization artistic effect, which also reduces the number of colors represented in an image. The difference between this and standard color quantization is that while in standard quantization the final palette is selected based upon a weighting of the prominence of existing colors in the image, posterization creates a palette of colors smoothly distributed across the spectrum represented in the image. Whereas with standard color quantization all of the final color values are ones that were in the original image, the color values in a posterized image may not have been present in the original image but are in between the original color values.

Dithering

A fine control is provided for the dithering that occurs during color and shading alterations, including the ability to generate halftone dithering.

Liquid rescaling

In 2008, support for liquid rescaling was added. [12] This feature allows, for example, rescaling 4:3 images into 16:9 images without distorting the image.

Artistic effects

ImageMagick includes a variety of filters and features intended to create artistic effects:

OpenCL

ImageMagick can use OpenCL to use an accelerated graphics card (GPU) for processing. [13]

Deep color

The Q8 version supports up-to 8 bits-per-pixel component (8-bit grayscale, 24- or 32-bit RGB color). The Q16 version supports up-to 16 bits-per-pixel component (16-bit grayscale, up-to 48- or 64-bit RGB color).

Other

Below are some other features of ImageMagick:

Distribution

ImageMagick is cross-platform, and runs on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems including Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, Solaris, Haiku and FreeBSD. The project's source code can be compiled for other systems, including AmigaOS 4.0 and MorphOS. It has been run under IRIX. [14]

GraphicsMagick is a fork of ImageMagick 5.5.2 made in 2002, emphasizing the cross-release stability of the programming API and command-line options. GraphicsMagick emerged as a result of irreconcilable differences in the developers' group. [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

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The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on June 15, 1987.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PNG</span> Family of lossless compression file formats for image files

Portable Network Graphics is a raster-graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)—unofficially, the initials PNG stood for the recursive acronym "PNG's not GIF".

PCX, standing for PiCture eXchange, was an image file format developed by the now-defunct ZSoft Corporation of Marietta, Georgia, United States. It was the native file format for PC Paintbrush and became one of the first widely accepted DOS imaging standards, although it has since been succeeded by more sophisticated image formats, such as BMP, JPEG, and PNG. PCX files commonly stored palette-indexed images ranging from 2 or 4 colors to 16 and 256 colors, although the format has been extended to record true-color (24-bit) images as well.

The BMP file format or bitmap, is a raster graphics image file format used to store bitmap digital images, independently of the display device, especially on Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems.

QuickDraw was the 2D graphics library and associated application programming interface (API) which is a core part of classic Mac OS. It was initially written by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld. QuickDraw still existed as part of the libraries of macOS, but had been largely superseded by the more modern Quartz graphics system. In Mac OS X Tiger, QuickDraw has been officially deprecated. In Mac OS X Leopard applications using QuickDraw cannot make use of the added 64-bit support. In OS X Mountain Lion, QuickDraw header support was removed from the operating system. Applications using QuickDraw still ran under OS X Mountain Lion to macOS High Sierra; however, the current versions of Xcode and the macOS SDK do not contain the header files to compile such programmes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ILBM</span> File format

Interleaved Bitmap (ILBM) is an image file format conforming to the Interchange File Format (IFF) standard. The format originated on the Amiga platform, and on IBM-compatible systems, files in this format or the related PBM format are typically encountered in games from late 1980s and early 1990s that were either Amiga ports or had their graphical assets designed on Amiga machines.

Color depth or colour depth, also known as bit depth, is either the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel, or the number of bits used for each color component of a single pixel. When referring to a pixel, the concept can be defined as bits per pixel (bpp). When referring to a color component, the concept can be defined as bits per component, bits per channel, bits per color, and also bits per pixel component, bits per color channel or bits per sample (bps). Modern standards tend to use bits per component, but historical lower-depth systems used bits per pixel more often.

Dither is an intentionally applied form of noise used to randomize quantization error, preventing large-scale patterns such as color banding in images. Dither is routinely used in processing of both digital audio and video data, and is often one of the last stages of mastering audio to a CD.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">X BitMap</span> File format

In computer graphics, the X Window System used X BitMap (XBM), a plain text binary image format, for storing cursor and icon bitmaps used in the X GUI. The XBM format is superseded by XPM, which first appeared for X11 in 1989.

Netpbm is an open-source package of graphics programs and a programming library. It is used mainly in the Unix world, where one can find it included in all major open-source operating system distributions, but also works on Microsoft Windows, macOS, and other operating systems.

8-bit color graphics are a method of storing image information in a computer's memory or in an image file, so that each pixel is represented by 8 bits (1 byte). The maximum number of colors that can be displayed at any one time is 256 per RGB channel or 28.

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In computer graphics, image tracing, raster-to-vector conversion or raster vectorization is the conversion of raster graphics into vector graphics.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Palette (computing)</span> In computer graphics, a finite set of available colors

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Color quantization</span>

In computer graphics, color quantization or color image quantization is quantization applied to color spaces; it is a process that reduces the number of distinct colors used in an image, usually with the intention that the new image should be as visually similar as possible to the original image. Computer algorithms to perform color quantization on bitmaps have been studied since the 1970s. Color quantization is critical for displaying images with many colors on devices that can only display a limited number of colors, usually due to memory limitations, and enables efficient compression of certain types of images.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perl OpenGL</span>

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AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) is an open, royalty-free image file format specification for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF container format. It competes with HEIC, which uses the same container format built upon ISOBMFF, but HEVC for compression. Version 1.0.0 of the AVIF specification was finalized in February 2019.

References

  1. "History". ImageMagick. Archived from the original on March 14, 2018. Retrieved March 18, 2018. Dr. Pensak had to convince upper management at DuPont. ... Either way, ImageMagick would not be available today without DuPont transferring the copyright to ImageMagick Studio LLC. ImageMagick was posted to Usenet's comp.archives group on August 1, 1990.
  2. "Release 7.1.1-23".
  3. 1 2 3 "ImageMagick: License". ImageMagick. Archived from the original on October 26, 2016. Retrieved October 26, 2016.
  4. "ImageMagick License". spdx.org.
  5. "ImageMagick: History". www.imagemagick.org. ImageMagick Studio. Archived from the original on October 29, 2016. Retrieved October 18, 2016.
  6. Hajdarbegovic, Nermin (February 12, 2019). "ImageMagick: Manipulating Graphics From The Command-Line?". whoishostingthis.com. Archived from the original on September 29, 2020. Retrieved August 18, 2020.
  7. "ImageMagick". computerhope.com. February 27, 2019. Retrieved August 18, 2020.
  8. "Exploits gone wild: Hackers target critical image-processing bug". Ars Technica. 2016. Archived from the original on September 25, 2016. Retrieved September 26, 2016.
  9. "Inside ImageTragick: The Real Payloads Being Used to Hack Websites". CloudFlare. 2016. Archived from the original on October 1, 2016. Retrieved September 26, 2016.
  10. Williams, Chris (May 4, 2016). "Server-jacking exploits for ImageMagick are so trivial, you'll scream". The Register. Archived from the original on December 23, 2017. Retrieved December 22, 2017.
  11. LLC, ImageMagick Studio. "PerlMagick, Perl API @ ImageMagick". imagemagick.org. Archived from the original on May 10, 2017. Retrieved May 22, 2017.
  12. "ImageMagick Changelog". Archived from the original on June 6, 2016. Retrieved July 29, 2021.
  13. "ImageMagick: Architecture". Archived from the original on June 1, 2016. Retrieved January 6, 2010.
  14. "Magick++ API: Install Magick++". imagemagick.org. Archived from the original on May 8, 2017. Retrieved May 22, 2017.
  15. "Introducing GraphicsMagick Project". ImageMagick-developer Mailing List. March 15, 2003.

Further reading