ImageMagick command line replication with Image::Magick

[Trizor]

Greeings Monks,

I've been working with some images recently using imagemagick. I started by creating the desired image with the command line tools, but the final objective is to avoid forking off processes, so I would like to be able to use Image::Magick to replecate my steps. This is where I run into trouble.

A brief synopsis of the commands I've run (escape for your shell as needed):

convert ( imgbase*.gif -colorspace Gray -colors 2 -negate ) -colorize 
+$color -negate -transparent white outimg%02d.gif
convert -background white outimg01.gif outimg02.gif outimg03.gif $etc 
+-flatten outcomp.gif

And the code that from what I've gleaned from the documentation should do the same thing.

my $image;

print "Creating composite...\n";

my @imgfiles = glob("img*.gif");

my $compos = Image::Magick->new(size=>'3200x1324');

foreach my $img (reverse @imgfiles) {
        print "\t Compositing image $img... ";
        $image = Image::Magick->new();
        $image->Read($img);
        $image->Quantize(colors=>2,colorspace=>"Gray");
        $image->Negate();
        $image->Colorize(fill=>"rgb(".(pop @colors).")");
        $image->Negate();
        $image->Transparent(color=>"white");

        push @$compos,$image;
        undef $image;
        print "composed.\n";
}

$compos->Flatten();
$compos->Write('outcomp.gif');

The docs seem kindof sparse and obstruse to me, so if there are undocumented caveats or other things I should know please light the darkness monks.

[zentara]

I know what you mean.... the Perl syntax for Image::Magick is often quite different from the commandline version, and the docs are not very clear. All I usually do is look through the demo.pl that comes in /ImageMagick-6.3.3/PerlMagick/demo, and see what it does. It's a fairly complete demo. Then there is the perl-magick-overview , (although I've sometimes found that it dosn't always have the correct syntax either). Finally, google, and groups.google searches, will sometimes yield clues to correct perl syntax for IM operations.

[strredwolf]

I tried ImageMagick and the Perl Image::Magick for a while. However, PPM's kept being written as 16-bit RAW files, GIF's and PNG's weren't optimized tightly, and as you said, the docs aren't great. So I switched to NetPBM. Granted, I'm still forking off processes but it's a straight-forward set of tools.

[halley]

The question is, does your code work or not? You didn't relate what the actual trouble might be.