ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a free tool for manipulating images. It generally works on the command line, but also supports python (perhaps it's better to say python supports it, whatever). You can locate and install ImageMagick multiple ways. A quick web-search will help you figure out how you need to do it. I run OSX so I used "macports" to install it: sudo port install ImageMagick Once you get it installed make sure you can use it by typing convert -version at the command line. You should see some information about ImageMagick (including it's version, I see 6.1.8) and the options that convert takes. If you don't see this useful information you need to keep working.


There do exist python bindings for ImageMagick, however after about four hours of hacking I couldn't find compatible versions of ImageMagick, Magick++, PythonMagick, and Boost to make it work in python. Perhaps I'll come back to this topic later, but for now we will focus on using the Python Imaging Library (PIL).