On approximately 3/26/2009 8:42 AM, came the following characters from the keyboard of [email protected]: > I have been struggling to find the correct arguments to use within the > ImageMagick "convert" command to take several (sometimes more than 20) > TIFF images and create a single TIFF image that is multiple pages. The > command I have used is: > > convert image001.tif image002.tif image003.tif ... imageN.tif -append > image.tif > > Problems I have seen as this attempts to convert the image: > * The input TIF images are less than 50K each yet the temporary images are > each around 36M > * The result image is 250M > * Performance is very slow > > Anyone done this with good results? > > Thanks! > Jose
I speculate that your input .tif files have few colors, perhaps even bitonal, and are compressed. If so, the problem is that ImageMagick always works on intermediate files at full color depth (-8 or -16, depending on which version of ImageMagick you have). The developers claim that processing bitonal images efficiently would require a major new subsystem for pixel handling (they usually seem to know what they are talking about; I don't know the innards of the code, though, to confirm it). The solution? To solve the final file size, you can specify -depth and/or an appropriate compression mode, which you seem not to in the above command line. To solve the performance, and intermediate image size problems requires the use of a different tool. On Windows, IrfanView provides sufficient command line options to perform this operation from a batch file, either in one swoop (if all the files have similar characteristics), or one-by-one appending (if you want different color depths or compression modes for different pages). For other platforms, I don't know of appropriate tools, although I think IrfanView will run under Wine. I would certainly like to see ImageMagick improved to handle bitonal images more effectively, but I don't have the time to do it myself, so I don't complain loudly. I do watch for other graphics tools that come along, that might do the tasks I need, but so far I find myself using IrfanView for the things it will do from the command line, and ImageMagick for complex manipulations. Recommendations welcome. YMMV. Good luck. -- Glenn -- http://nevcal.com/ =========================== A protocol is complete when there is nothing left to remove. -- Stuart Cheshire, Apple Computer, regarding Zero Configuration Networking _______________________________________________ Magick-users mailing list [email protected] http://studio.imagemagick.org/mailman/listinfo/magick-users
