I’m preparing a set of images for upload for a future blog post and started to make the edits in Photoshop but quickly became frustrated with the work required. For each image I had to:
- Shrink the image from 4000×5000 down to 480×600
- Increase the canvas to 640×520
- Place a 20 pixel border on the image
- Change the font smoothing to smooth for each text region
- Pray everything lines up or fix it manually
The problem was not everything was clean when I expanded the images in step 2 so getting a smooth edge was proving to be a challenge. I remembered that ImageMagick had some nifty commands to do the same thing in seconds. Allow me to explain.
ImageMagick processes commands from left to right.
mogrify -resize 600x600 -bordercolor black -border 20 -format png *.jpg
Mogrify is the command in ImageMagick to run a batch set of commands. In this case on all jpg files. This command does the following order of operations:
- Sets the size of the image to no wider than 600 pixels. This handles landscape and portrait images. 600×600 is the bounding box.
- Sets the border color to black
- Adds a 20 pixel border on all sides of the image
- Exports the image in the PNG file format.
Sure, I could have done everything with Photoshop no problem. What having a “build script” does it it prepares your assets in a reproducible way. It’s easy then to change the border color, make the border bigger, or resize the image. I just re-run the script with the new values. One point of note, the output to PNG is specific. Had I done JPG, the converter would overwrite my originals.
For more examples on ImageMagick
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