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When I started with photography, I soon ran into the limitations of GIMP. While GIMP is a good graphics suite, it has as of yet still one drawback - it is limited to 8 bit per color channel, as opposed to Adobe Photoshop and other commercial programs, which supports 16 bit by now. As I had some specific tricks in mind, I was beginning to miss 16 bit processing. It is promised that GIMP will go over to GEGL with v2.6 and bring 16 bit support then, yet there is only a source prerelease available as of yet and it is not quite clear whether the tools such as filters will actually make full use of 16 bit.

This was when I actually started to write my own scripts for handling PGM data generated by dcraw. Yet I soon found out that PHP was probably not the language best suited to do large scale image manipulation with 16 bit files. But since I had already confined myself to the Command Line, I came to remember about imagemagick, a collection of command line based image processing tools which I thought mostly suited to handle task such as generating a pile of thumbnails.

Boy have I been wrong.

That thing reads and writes about everything from prehistoric cave paintings to floating point EXR files, and converts and modifies them too, with a plethora of filters that make Adobe Photoshop look like MS PAINT (Windows 3.11). Ok, honestly, it's a little bit strange to handle with no preview and nice slides, rulers and curves to manipulate, but as I'm some kind of nerd, it's actually fun. And certainly it's quite a good way to treat 162 RAW images: write a short script, kick it and go fetch some coke and return to find a pile of nicely treated images.

Also, I find this is a proper way for a nerd to make images: go out and measure electromagnetic radiation between 710 and 400 nm and then spend a day to find the proper method to interpret the collected data.

This shall be the starting point of a new series about imagemagick.

Dieser Text ist Teil der Serie Fun with imagemagick

imagemagick
Bayer interpolation with imagemagick

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