ImageMagick, photo editing from the command line and Lightroom

Saturday 26 December 2020, 14:14 by Dick Holtman | 5,004 views | 2 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Although Photoshop and ImageMagick both first appeared in 1987, everyone knows Photoshop. But who has heard of ImageMagick? In this blog, I want to briefly introduce you to ImageMagick and point out the powerful combination with Lightroom.

Before I explain what ImageMagick is and what it can do, I want to point out that, for me, ImageMagick only becomes really interesting when combined with Lightroom. More on that later.

What is ImageMagick

Wikipedia describes ImageMagick as: ImageMagick is a graphics programme that can be used for digital image editing. The computer programme consists of a number of command-line-based programmes.

They say themselves: Use ImageMagick^® to create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images. It can read and write images in a variety of formats (over 200) including PNG, JPEG, GIF, HEIC, TIFF, DPX, EXR, WebP, Postscript, PDF, and SVG.

ImageMagick can resize, flip, mirror, rotate, distort, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.

Translated, this says:
Use ImageMagick® to create, edit, compose or convert bitmap images.

It can read and write images in various formats (more than 200), including PNG, JPEG, GIF, HEIC, TIFF, DPX, EXR, WebP, Postscript, PDF and SVG.

ImageMagick can resize, mirror, rotate, distort, shear and transform images, adjust image colours, apply various special effects or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.

This shows the huge range of possibilities offered by these programmes. And if you are still not convinced, I invite you to visit the website and look at "Features and Capabilities".

It should also be clear why so few people know it, because to use it you have to work from the old DOS box (Windows) or a Unix shell. And who still does that to edit pictures?

A few examples

Here are a few less obvious examples of what you can do with ImageMagick. In the first example, we turn a photo into a cartoon drawing.

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We turn this photo into a sketch drawing

Photo by Gabriel Silvério on Unsplash


Finally, we combine several photos into one on a black background with a single command.


Command used:
magick montage -background black -geometry +4+3 *cartoon.jpg montage.jpg

What to use it for

If you have excellent programmes such as Photoshop or Gimp, why would you use a programme such as ImageMagick that works with the command line at all?

The most obvious answer lies precisely in the "command line". This allows you to make the programme work based on a batch. For example, adding a watermark or border to all photos in a directory, or changing their size.

You can also control the programme from another programme. This brings us to the final subject of this blog, namely the cooperation between Lightroom and ImageMagick.

ImageMagick and Lightroom

Normally, you use ImageMagick as part of the export process. So, it is a post-processing step.

The ability to perform additional edits in the background during export is precisely what makes ImageMagick so attractive for use with Lightroom.

One of the first plug-ins for Lightroom, LR/Mogrify 2 from 2008, uses ImageMagick in the background to perform additional edits on photos during export. This allows you to add borders, watermarks and text to your exported photos.

I have also created the Transparency exporter plug-in. This plug-in replaces a selected or specified colour with transparency.

There are of course specialist programmes that can probably do this better, but this plug-in allows you to easily make the background of 10, 100 or 1,000 photos transparent from Lightroom during export. And you can do this without any manual work.

The major advantage lies in integrating additional post-processing options into the Lightroom workflow.

The possibilities are huge, waiting to be discovered.

Getting started with ImageMagick and support

For those who want to get started with ImageMagick, the internet is an enormous source of knowledge. There are several videos with examples on YouTube.

Questions are answered well on the forum. The old forum also contains a huge number of questions and answers.

Background information

• ImageMagick website
• Wikipedia (Dutch)
• Wikipedia (English)
• Use ImageMagick to quickly and easily process images for your blog
• Lightroom plug-ins
• LightroomStatistics.com
• Photographers-toolbox.com
  The Lightroom plug-in specialist
  

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