ImageMagick scripts

A key player in making my time-lapse videos is ImageMagick in its command-line form so I can run batch processes, whether Windows or Linux.

As of October 2017, Magick is at v7.0.7, which has undergone changes and talks about "legacy (e.g. convert)", so I installed the legacy since I used convert liberally. That said, you can still use convert as long as you put "magick" in front of the convert call: "magick convert -size 300x200 xc:red red.jpg"

Promo: "ImageMagick® is a software suite to create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images. It can read and write images in a variety of formats (over 200) including PNG, JPEG, JPEG-2000, GIF, TIFF,DPX, EXR, WebP, Postscript, PDF, and SVG. Use ImageMagick to 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."

Thank you to the many smart people out there who have shared their knowledge in getting the most out of IM! Here are a few:

• Fred Weinhaus Fred's ImageMagick Scripts
• Jerry Peek
• snibgo's ImageMagick pages (note: to use his filters, you must compile from source. Here's how I did it)
  • Shawn T O'neil

I use ActiveState Perl on Windows with a free Komodo editor. Easy to download and install on Windows! One of the Perl packages is PerlMagick

Most of my scripts are quite basic, consisting of looping through a directory to crop, re-size, lighten, threshold, composite. I must admit that I have fallen short in using IM's internal memory, falling to using intermediate temporary images because my patience ran out trying to figure it out (but sometimes resulting in a more obscure) command line.

My favourite piece of work so far is a combination of Elevate Web Builder and ImageMagick that allows me to do Ken Burns sweeps across an image (panning and zooming), but during a time-lapse. The EWB interface creates a text file of the crop and re-size parameters that is fed into script running ImageMagick calls. A reminder for clouds is that as the subject approaches the horizon, the linear motion appears to slow down.

• Video of the EWB interface zip file at bottom of page, along with perl script that calls IM with the parameters generated by the EWB web page
• An aurora video using the Ken Burns effect

Other techniques/scripts:

• Shift the camera part-way through a time-lapse. Here's how to use ImageMagick to chop off the left and add to the right, the missing part on to the first set of images.
• Stacking on an invisible comet. A perl script to gradually shift a set of images to stack on a moving object
• Transforming a Canon 60Da (no IR-filter) image into "normal" colorspace
• Solar Altitude stamp on NLC images