Free! - Mini-review and competition of ImageMagick Tricks - Reviews - Articles

Source article

This fast-paced and practical tutorial is packed with examples of photo manipulations, logo creation, animations, and complete web projects. With this book up your sleeve, you'll be creating spellbinding images from code in no time.

Overview

What you will learn from this book

Create exiting text effects and produce eye-catching logos and headings for use in your pages or applications.
Slice, dice, and filter your images to turn simple photos into mind-bending designs and illusions.
Create thumbnails by converting file types, resizing, and cropping to consistent size, aspect ratio, and format. Or create complete image catalogues with thumbnails, file names, and information combined in a single image.
Make your images look 3D with clever application of blurs, displacements, and masks
Use ImageMagick to create GIF animations, from simple slideshows to gradual morphs and effects.
Write web applications such as an advanced e-card generator, and even create your own Pack book cover!
Crystal clear explanations - this might be Magick, but there's no smoke and mirrors!

Who is this book for?

This book is for all levels of users as it takes you from the basic steps like installation and configuration to practical web projects and applications. Although it helps if you have some experience as a programmer.

Conclusion

The book uses many examples and cases to explain the features and commands of ImageMagick. There is a small downside though, because the book is printed in black and white, some of the effects that are related to colour and a color printed book would have made things more clear. The author shows you how to make optimal use of these features by using his creativity. To sum things up, if you like to learn from examples and if you want to get the most out of ImageMagick this book is for you!

Competition

The friendly people of Pack Publishing are giving away 5 books. All you need to do, to enter the competition is; download the extract (press read more and then download sample PDF on your right)and answer the following question:

How many locations does the gravity option use for adjusting drawing art works on a background?

Send your answer to this e-mail address, before Thursday the 14th of September 2006. Don't forget to include your post address and phone number (required for international shipping) in the e-mail.

Good Luck!