Customer Reviews

The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (Definitive Guides)

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ImageMagick is an extremely powerful, free, command-line image editor that has been around a while and is the preferred tool of many for dynamically creating images for the web. However, like many open-source projects, ImageMagick's weakness has always been poor documentation.

So I was excited when I saw there was finally a guide to ImageMagick, and ordered the book hot off the presses.

I have to say, though, I'm disappointed.

I was hoping for a book with a good command reference, tips and tricks, sample uses, and that sort of thing. Instead, it is a very basic introduction to ImageMagick.

The book is very graphical in nature, with about 75% of virtually every page filled by an image, and only a little text. The images, while a little useful, are probably larger than they need to be, and almost seem to be filler making up for the lack of text. They are also all black and white images, which makes them in some cases useless (i.e. "Figure 6-29. Alcatraz with varying levels of hue" depicts 4 essentially identical images - without color, you can't tell that one has less hue than another). For a book of this price, I would expect color photos.

As a result, the book feels very sparse, with little information on each page.

The last few chapters, which show code examples of how to use ImageMagick in several popular programming languages, are more in line with the sort of practical examples I was expecting, although this section feels short.

So overall, a decent *introduction* to ImageMagick, but I think calling it "Definitive" is a bit undeserved. It is the only game in town though, since for some reason no one else has written a book on ImageMagick. If you have already used ImageMagick, this book is only marginally useful.

I'll have to keep hoping O'Reilly does one, and does it right.

This was disappointing. The emphasis of the book is on the ImageMagick commandline tools rather than the APIs. There are a lot of photographs but they're all black and white. The before and after samples are worse than useless - they just take up space. It's probably not the Author's fault.
Apress (the publishers) should really have done this book properly and included glossy color pages where needed. As it stands, it's impossible to tell from looking at the before-and-after photos in the book, what most of the image operations are supposed to do. This is just cheap on the part of the publishers.
Stick to the online imagemagick tutorials and give this book a miss.

'The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick' by Michael Still is a nice guide which covers an extremely powerful set of tools that is lacking in documentation. Note that I say the word 'nice' and not GREAT. I wanted this to be great, I truly did. I use ImageMagick on a nearly daily basis and while I thought I knew I knew the ins and outs of this application pretty well, I was hoping that I could get some more out of this book, the only one of its kind on the market that I knew of.

Problem #1 NO COLOR IMAGES!!!!

How can you have a guide that covers manipulating and using images and provide no color examples when there are tons of other books the get away from the 3 colors of white, black and grey?? I realize that this was a decision made by the higher ups at Apress and it's a bad, bad, bad decision

Problem #2 At just over 300 pages and with some images (again, black and white) and cover nearly and entire page in size, this guide is certainly not DEFINITIVE. If you want to make a definitive guide, you need to have more content, more content, more content. More like 'An Introduction to ImageMagick' would be the more appropriate title.

If you are new to ImageMagick and want to see what can be done, this is a handy guide but any power users won't get a lot out of this book. The examples are handy, but the decision to have no color photos really hurts this text even as an introduction to the technology. Apress, you want some advice for version 2??? Get out the Crayola box!!

**** RECOMMENDED

Like many other open source software products ImageMagick has always suffered from poor documentation. That problem is helped considerably with the publication of The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick. For those who are used to working with fancy graphical interfaces ImageMagick will be quite a shock. It uses a command line interface which makes it easy to use put into your own programs and simply call or build the appropriate command line to produce the desired results. This book is designed for those readers who want to get right to work with the command-line tools or writing code to take advantage of the programming interface. Because of the ability of the software to make complex adjustments to images through the command line this book clearly demonstrates how to make quick changes without opening large complex programs. Some of the areas covered include resizing, changing compressions, blurring, charcoal effects, adding noise, and dithering. The last few chapters concentrate on programming with ImageMagick and Perl, C, Ruby, and PHP. A command line graphics program is not for everyone and especially so with all the powerful graphics programs available on the market today. However, if you want to write your own graphic transformation program or include that ability in your own interface then this is one of the easiest ways to implement it and The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick is the best documentation available for this product. That does not mean it could not be better. It could be much better and there are a lot of abilities that are not covered in much detail, but it is still the best documentation I have seen.

This book is a good introduction into ImageMagick. Nevertheless I find it disappointing there is not even one single colored image printed in there. This book discusses different image manipulation functions on color images and only shows B/W images.
I would have appreciated this information in the product presentation. Really poor

I'm looking forward to the second edition of the book. Hope to see "convert" able to handle html content, with doc in the book. (Probably not trivial.) Would also like to see more color examples and more complicated API examples in the book.