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ImageMagick book – Chapter 3: Compression and Other Metadata

Writing the summary of Chapter 2 seemed to work as a warmup for me the other day, so I thought I would write about Chapter 3 as a warm up for working some more on Chapter 7. I also need to look at reviewer comments for Chapters 2, 3, and 4 sometime today, so it seems like a good idea as well because it will help me remember what I am trying to cover in the chapter. Chapter 3 is all about the different things you can do with compression with ImageMagick, as well as other forms of image metadata. So, I start out by talking about lossy versus lossless compression (there's an interesting tangent to this discussion which I need to add as a sidebar to the chapter during this editing process, but I'll leave that to another post here), I give some examples of the accumulative nature of the loss from lossy compressions. We then move on to compare the size of a bunch of images using different compression algorithms, which gives a good introduction to discussing which image format is the right choice for given scenarios. (As an aside that I will follow here, that was probably…

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ImageMagick book – Chapter 2: Basic Image Manipulation

I'm meant to be writing the rest of chapter seven tonight, but I thought I would warm up by continuing with my promised series of posts about the content of the book. The next chapter in the list is chapter two, which covers simple image manipulations. The idea was to get the stuff which everyone wants to do and cover it as soon as possible so that people can get some runs on the board (so to speak). In chapter two you will find an introduction to the bits of imaging theory that we need for the book (rasters, vectors, bitmaps, pixels, you get the idea). Then I move on to talk about ways to change the size of images. This includes resizing, sampling cropping, scaling, thumb-nailing and so forth. We also discuss some interesting transformations like trim. Then we move onto making an image larger, before finishing up with how to process many images at once with ImageMagick. It's an interesting chapter in that it's immediately useful, and goes through some interesting theory matters. It also sets the stage for the later coverage of all the other cool stuff you can do with ImageMagick. As a point of interest,…

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Some details about the publication process

Pascal asked in the comments to a previous post about the book about how I was going about writing the book and how the publication process works. It's a good question, and something I meant to cover here anyway, so now seems like a good time. I'll start from the beginning with a brief summary of how I got started with this writing thing. I started off by writing a number of articles for IBM DeveloperWorks. DeveloperWorks are actually really good to work with, all I did to start writing from them was fill in the proposal web form within a couple of hours we'd sorted out what was happening, and off we went. The ImageMagick articles I wrote turned out to be quite popular with the ImageMagick people. I suspect that's why the editor for Apress, a lovely guy named Matt contacted me. He pitched the book to me, and I was originally hesitant. He spent a fair bit of time (a month?) discussing the project with me, and I ended up deciding that because it's fairly closely aligned with the imaging work I'm doing for my PhD, I ended up saying yes. Along the way I wrote a…

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ImageMagick book – Chapter 1: Installation and Configuration

I want to talk about the chapter I'm currently writing, but in order to do that in a way which makes sense, I really need to mention the chapters which are already written. Well, it makes sense to me at least, and this is my site, so I guess I get to do that if I want. Chapter 1 of the book covers installation and configuration of ImageMagick on a variety of platforms including various Linux distributions, FreeBSD, and Windows. I didn't cover MacOS, as I figured that most people who care will know how to use Fink, and I don't have access to a Macintosh to write anything on. I'll write a summary of the other chapters I've already finished writing soon.

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A book on ImageMagick?

I've been sitting on this for a little while, and a couple of people I've met in the flesh have heard about it, but I think the time is right to start talking about it more in public. A little while ago Apress asked me if I would be interested in writing a book on ImageMagick, presumably based on my having written two articles on ImageMagick for IBM DeveloperWorks. You can find those articles here and here. The book is a complete re-implementation of that content, despite my contract with IBM allowing for reuse, because that basically has to be done to make the book coherent and flow. Anyway, the contract has now been signed by myself and Gary Cornell (recent interview). The first three chapters have been written and are currently undergoing review. I have a table of contents and a schedule, so I know what else I'm going to cover. Why Apress? Well, apart from the fact that they approached me, which is flattering, they're also a pretty awesome technical publisher. They're the publisher of Nick Weinholt's .NET books, Joel Spolsky's software development books, and heaps of other stuff. Checkout they're site for more information. I've got a…

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