Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mrSugar 3793 days ago
So, a question: why? Just so that there is an alternative (not that there is anything wrong with that), or is there an issue with ImageMagick that discourages some people from using it?
5 comments

GMIC is far more powerful with a lot of very sophisticated filters [1] and a completely different beast to ImageMagick to the point of this title being actively misleading. Yes, both can edit images. But so can Gimp or Darktable, but they are not trying to displace IM either.

[1]: http://opensource.graphics/christmas-is-already-here-for-ima...

Imagemagick is 25 years old. It is one of the canonical softwares that doesn't seem to have any alternative. If anyone has something else to bring to the table I'd love to see it.

I don't know what your standard is when it comes to software but by this point I'd expect a lot more out of what we have. I've experienced nothing but headaches with imagemagick. Have you ever tried to use it for rasterising a pdf? Forget about it.

The only other alternatives I'm familiar with involve 3rd parties and web based apis. If you want to perform image editing in an app, it seems like its the only choice.

I don't think this software is an alternative to imagemagick, but those are my thoughts on imagemagick since you asked.

Flexibility. With G'Mic it's easy to implement a new feature or a plugin. With ImageMagick, I wouldn't even know where to start. Esoteric command line input is not my definition of a user interface designed for artists.

Plus it comes bundled in with Krita and Gimp.

Just as a sidenote, if you like playing around with G'Mic, you might absolutely love Python+OpenCV+Numpy combination. It's crazy powerful for tiny amounts of code required.

It's also a GIMP plugin. ImageMagick is command-line only.
Thanks for the replies, everyone. I have only used ImageMagick lightly, for e. g. resizing or merging simple bitmaps, and I never found it lacking. However, I recognize that there are users who need more.