There are so many capabilities you can work with in ImageMagick! We are going to study the most popular of them and then we will see how to use these features as programmers in our practical projects. Some of the topics and features that will be studied in this book are summarized as follows:

•    Format Conversion: Convert an image from one format to another (about 100 formats supported)

•    Text & Comments: Inserting descriptive or artistic text in images

•    Transformations: Resize, rotate, crop, flip, and flop images

•    Color Correction: Define threshold, reduce color, and color conversion for images

•    Background: Create beautiful backgrounds and canvases

•    Thumbnail and Frame: Create a framed thumbnail of an image

•    Transparency: Create a transparent image for use on the World Wide Web

•    Animation: Create a GIF animation sequence from a group of images

•    Composite: Combine several images to create a composite image

•    Montage: Generate a thumbnail index of a list of images

•    Special Effects: Add artistic filters like charcoal, monochrome, and so on to an image

•    Multifunctioning: Execute a group of tasks with a single script on entire directories of images

•    Image Identification: Describe the format of the image and attributes

•    File Management: Retrieve, list, or print files from a remote network site

ImageMagick’s Core Utilities
The real power of ImageMagick comes from its utilities. In fact with the help of these utilities we are able to do any reading, writing, and manipulating tasks on images. There are always third-party utilities that add more power to ImageMagick but the core utilities of this package are discussed below.

Display
We can expect any image viewing and managing functionality including load, print, write to file, zoom, copy a region of the image, paste a region to the image, crop, show histogram, and so on from this utility.

Convert
The main task of the Convert utility as its name suggests is converting image formats. We can use Convert for more functions, like making thumbnails of images, simulating a charcoal drawing, colorizing the image with the fill color, embossing an image, specifying a clipping mask, morphing an image sequence, and simulating an oil painting too.

Import
The Import utility is used to capture the screen and convert it to a file. We can specify a single window, the entire screen, or any rectangular portion of the screen for capturing.

For saving as a file we have options to set the preferred number of colors in the image, the type of colorspace, annotate an image with a comment, add coder/ decoder-specific options, and assign a label to an image.

Animate
For showing animated formats or a sequence of still images we use the Animate utility. One of the important features of Animate is its capability for color reduction to match the color resolution of the workstation. We can show any full color images on a weak display unit (like a monochrome one).

Composite
The Composite utility has a number of unique techniques for combining several separate images and making a composite result. Images can be composited together with the following schemes: Over, In, Out, Atop, Xor, Plus, Minus, Difference, Multiply, and Bumpmap.

Montage
This arranges a group of images into a single image or page and can apply ambiences such as border and shadow to them. This is useful for creating thumbnail images or a gallery effect.

Mogrify
Mogrify is mainly used for image transformation. These transformations include image scaling, image rotation, color reduction, and others. The main difference between Mogrify and other utilities is that it overwrites the result on the original image.

Conjure
Do you have an aversion to popular ImageMagick programming languages like Perl, C, C++, PHP, and so on? If yes then you can use the Magick Scripting Language (MSL). This is an XML-based language and using the Conjure utility you can do any image processing activity without a Perl interpreter. First you write code for desired action and then call Conjure to execute that code.

Identify
For detecting more information about an image format we use the Identify utility. Besides other useful information like file name, file size, file format, width and height of the image, whether the image is color mapped and the number of colors in the image, and so on, it can detect if an image is corrupted.

Interfaces
ImageMagick APIs (Application Programming Interface) are programming tools and libraries that programmers are definitely interested in. With the help of these tools, everyone can write his/her own image processing application for performing customized actions.