ImageMagick

Procrasticoding: annotate animated GIFs (or even add a picture/watermark)

Written by  on April 20, 2016

The sun rose, the cats were watching the birds on the windowsill and at first I just wanted to take a cute picture of them sitting soo close, but then I had another inspiration ..

0. Prepared the logo from some internetsearch; stripped of colors, converted to 3-color-GIF with transparency: all done by GIMP and some magic.
1. converted the video to GIF with greyscaling and resizing
2. merged the two pictures while optimizing the layers and applying some contrast

BTW: sometimes empty phrase-error messages spark my fury … “convert.im6: non-conforming drawing primitive definition `image’ @ error/draw.c/DrawImage/3158.
” … and what does this tell me now?!?
But at least I am not the first one who understood nothing! Thank you.

combined320

Video to *good* GIF

Written by  on April 7, 2016

You can use a crappy app or some webservice … or DIY!

read: start at second 4 with length 3, use high quality-conversion, downscale (because scaling with ‘convert’ will result in artifacts because of the color-indexing), out-filename

If some rotation is needed (-vf “transpose=2” is also an option, but the quality suffered), add it afterwards via convert.

OSX: How to get imageMagick (working with fonts)?

Written by  on June 15, 2015

Hmm, OSX offers out of the box a lot of UI-programs, but is missing most of the *NIX-fun. So if you need imageMagick for your work, you are missing it. The prepared installers are missing the support for the font-manipulation.
Of course, you can download and build all packages by yourself from scratch … or you use one of the nice packet-managers like fink, macports or homebrew.

The fastest way to get a usable OSX (tried with 10.10 and 10.8) for the contactSheet-script is by executing those simple four commands in your terminal. Existing internet-connection assumed:

(Linux: use your favorite package-manager.
Windows: :DDDDD I guess it won’t work until you also get some bash-replacement.)

Check afterwards the current configuration. The list of delegates should show “freetype” or “fontconfig”. If both are missing, then rendering the filename onto the thumbnails won’t work!

 

createContactSheet 0.4

Written by  on June 14, 2015

Okee, sorry for the continued spam about this small bash-project, but I am a little bit excited. It turned out much more powerful than expected. I learned a lot new and really useful stuff. I am also really confident now about the future of “bash & me” 😉

I improved the latest state with an idea a good friend pointed out: why don’t you add the original file name to each thumbnail? For a better overview? This is done also by imageMagick (convert); also append now the base-directory as footer-note. Because for my workflow the dir-name is the scan-date and the emulsion-type.
Some other improvements are: changed workflow (negative-conversion on each picture instead of the whole combined one; therefore no “filling of the last row” needed); script-parameters for help and version and for suppressing the negfix8-conversion; cleaner code.

I have also some more ideas in mind, but I think for now it is enough. It was fun, but I also want to discover some other areas of IT!

Download this: createContactSheet_0.4

contactSheet_pixeled

createContactSheet 0.3

Written by  on June 13, 2015

I fixed a small glitch, which was included in the first releases: input-filenames with spaces were not treated correctly therefore no result was created. Fixed by some string-replacement and setting the IFS-variable which dictates that bash should treat spaces not as separators.
For the next release some filename-embedding into the thumbnail is planned. But this has to happen after the negfix8-conversion else it would alter the conversion itself ..

Download this: version_0.3

Small hint: git offers a really nice exporting-function which will just include the current state of the given branch:

You want a contact sheet with that?

Written by  on June 3, 2015

Slogan is like always: “If you are not ashamed of the first release of XYZ, then you waited too long or have no self-reflection.”

It would be nice to have a preview shaped like the original contact sheets of a HDR-film scan. So you could screenshot the thumbnails and print this.

Or you try the following script:

  • it takes all TIF from one directory (assuming they are HDR-scans from SilverFast)
  • creates thumbnails with a longer side of 400px into a separate directory
  • appends six thumbnails for each row and the combines all rows to a single picture. If the number of pictures does not fit, the last picture is repeatedly appended (this is necessary due to the negative conversion)
  • ‘negfixes’ them (negative conversion done by the great original script of negfix8 from JaZ99!)
  • spreads the contrast in two diffent approaches (check yourself which is your most liked version)

As a result you get something like this:

combinedSheet_negfix8_stretched1.00_scaled

As you can see: the black strips at the left and right side of the pictures still exist. But since I scan always the HDR-files with top and bottom cropped, the black borders don’t show up there. Time to change my workflow?

Download:

 HowTo:

  • download & extract the two scripts
  • open a bash-terminal an navigate INTO the directory with the HDR-scans
  • run “/PATHTOSCRIPT/createContactSheet.sh” and wait for 2 to 3 minutes

Future plans:

  • improve the structure of the code and add some more comments and make it less error-prone
  • full clean-up after the creation (by default; suppresable by param)
  • suppress the negfixing by param so also E6 (slide)-scans can be ‘contact sheeted’
  • make the script use the general temp-folder and put just the final two contact sheets into the target folder (so the data stays clean)
  • add the filename in the bottom-right as transparent overlay so you know which thumbnail belongs to which picture

 

edit 20150603: Just uploaded version 0.2 which improves performance a lot and cleans everything up and has a nicer structure!

Combine several images to a GIF-animation

Written by  on January 19, 2015
  • convert all JPG from the current directory to a looping GIF with 0.2 s delay and resize them to 600 px for the width:

  • GIF-animation was never easier! This is the result from combining 36 E6-photos (taken with a delay of roundabout 1 s).

stormy day

Stitch two pictures together

Written by  on January 10, 2015

* install imagemagick

* note: + appends horizontally; vertically