Software for ranslating between image file formats

Vision List Digest: Article 4, Volume 9, Issue 13
From: Philip Kahn
Post-Followup: submission@VISLIST.com

In article <9003070500.AA27858@deimos.ads.com> Vision-List@ADS.COM writes:
>From: YUHUA LUO
>Subject: RasterOps Image Formats
>
>We have a Macintosh RasterOps to capture and display images. We like
>to convert the image format from it to Sun's. It uses two different
>formats of image : PICT and TIFF. Does anyone know the format of these
>two or where to get the information about them ?

barad@bourbon.ee.tulane.edu (Herb Barad), johnston@csam.lbl.gov (Bill
Johnston [advdev]), and celit!billd@celerity.fps.com (Bill Davidson)
suggest looking at the weekly posting in comp.graphics which lists
MANY good utilities for file format conversions.

The following is from the weekly comp.graphics posting:

This message is automatically posted once a week in an effort to cut
down on the repetitive junk in comp.graphics. It was last changed on
26jan90. If you have answers to other frequently asked questions that
you would like included in this posting, please send me mail. If you
don't want to see this posting every week, please add the subject line
to your kill file. Thank you.

Jef

Jef Poskanzer jef@well.sf.ca.us {ucbvax, apple, hplabs}!well!jef
"...Is this a trick question?"


Contents:

1) General references for graphics questions.
2) Drawing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional screen.
3) Quantizing 24 bit images down to 8 bits.
4) Converting color into grayscale.
5) Quantizing grayscale to black&white.
6) Rotating a raster image by an arbitrary angle.
7) Free image manipulation software.
8) Format documents for GIF, TIFF, IFF, BIFF, WHIFF, etc.
9) Converting between vector formats.
10) How to get Pixar films.

[ items 1-6 deleted ]

7) Free image manipulation software. There are a number of toolkits
for converting from one image format to another, doing simple image
manipulations such as size scaling, plus the above-mentioned 24 -> 8,
color -> gray, gray -> b&w conversions. Here are pointers to some of
them:

PBMPLUS, by Jef Poskanzer. Comprehensive format conversion and image
manipulation package. The latest version is always available via
anonymous FTP as expo.lcs.mit.edu:contrib/pbmplus.tar.Z and
ftp.ee.lbl.gov:pbmplus.tar.Z. The version of 22nov89 (which currently
is still the latest version, except for the one official patch so far)
was posted to comp.sources.misc, and is therefore accessible via mail
to one of the archive servers. This version is also available in the
X.V11R4 release tape. A mailing list is available for users and
developers - write to pbm-request@helios.ee.lbl.gov.

IM Raster Toolkit, by Alan Paeth (awpaeth@watcgl.uwaterloo.ca).
Provides a portable and efficient format and related toolkit. The
format is versatile in supporting pixels of arbitrary channels,
components, and bit precisions while allowing compression and machine
byte-order independence. The kit contains more than 50 tools with
extensive support of image manipulation, digital halftoning and format
conversion. Previously distributed on tape c/o the University of
Waterloo, an FTP version will appear in 1/90 (stay tuned).

Utah RLE Toolkit. Conversion and manipulation package, similar to
PBMPLUS. Available via FTP as cs.utah.edu:pub/toolkit-2.0.tar.Z and
ucsd.edu:graphics/utah-raster-toolkit.tar.Z.

Fuzzy Pixmap Manipulation, by Michael Mauldin .
Conversion and manipulation package, similar to PBMPLUS. Available via
FTP as nl.cs.cmu.edu:/usr/mlm/ftp/fbm.tar.Z and ucsd.edu:graphics/
fbm.tar.Z, and also in your nearest comp.sources.unix archive.

Img-whatnot, by Paul Raveling . Reads and
writes its own image format, displays on an X.V11 screen, and does some
image manipulations. Available via FTP as expo.lcs.mit.edu:contrib/
Img.tar.Z, and venera.isi.edu:pub/Img.tar.Z along with a large
collection of color images.

Xim, by Philip R. Thompson. Reads and writes its own image format,
displays on an X.V11 screen, and does some image manipulations.
Available via FTP as expo.lcs.mit.edu:contrib/xim3c.tar.Z.

xloadimage, by Jim Frost . Reads in images in various
formats and displays them on an X.V11 screen. Available via FTP as
expo.lcs.mit.edu:contrib/xloadimage.tar.Z, and in your nearest
comp.sources.x archive.

TIFF Software, by Sam Leffler . Nice
portable library for reading and writing TIFF files, plus a few tools
for manipulating them and reading other formats. Available via FTP as
okeeffe.berkeley.edu:pub/tiff.tar.Z.

ALV, a Sun-specific image toolkit. Version 2.0.6 posted to
comp.sources.sun on 11dec89. Also available via email to
alv-users-request@cs.bris.ac.uk.

popi, an image manipulation language. Version 2.1 posted to
comp.sources.misc on 12dec89.

Don't forget to set binary mode when you FTP tar files. For you MILNET
folks who still don't have name servers, the IP addresses are:

expo.lcs.mit.edu 18.30.0.212
ftp.ee.lbl.gov 128.3.254.68
cs.utah.edu 128.110.4.21
NL.CS.CMU.EDU 128.2.222.56
venera.isi.edu 128.9.0.32
okeeffe.berkeley.edu 128.32.130.3
=============================================================
[from Jef's pbmplus documents - Bill J.]
------
Extended Portable Bitmap Toolkit
Distribution of 22nov89
Previous distribution 13sep89


Included are a number of programs for converting various image formats
to and from portable formats; plus some tools for manipulating the
portable formats.

PBM handles the following formats:

Sun icon file reading writing
Sun raster file reading writing
X10 and X11 bitmap file reading writing
MacPaint reading writing
CMU window manager format reading writing
MGR format reading writing
Group 3 FAX reading writing
X11 window dump file reading writing
X10 window dump file reading
Xerox doodle brushes reading
GEM .img format reading
PC paintbrush (.pcx) format reading
PICT reading
ASCII graphics writing
HP LaserJet format writing
GraphOn graphics writing
BBN BitGraph graphics writing
Printronix format writing

PGM handles the following formats:

TIFF reading
Usenix FaceSaver file reading
HIPS reading
FITS reading writing
PostScript "image" data reading
raw grayscale bytes reading
Encapsulated PostScript writing

PPM handles the following formats:

color Sun raster file reading writing
GIF reading writing
Amiga IFF ILBM reading writing
color X11 window dump file reading writing
color X10 window dump file reading
MTV ray-tracer output reading
QRT ray-tracer output reading
TrueVision Targa file reading
Img-whatnot file reading
color Encapsulated PostScript writing


************************************************************************
* Announcing the "Fuzzy PixMap" (or FBM) image manipulation library *
************************************************************************

Current version 0.96

Newly added: TIFF read support and Utah RLE support.

Philosophy

Each program can read any of the understood formats, and
can write any of the understood formats that make sense for
the image data.

Programs are designed around specific image operations (sizing,
scaling, retoning, halftoning, quantizing, etc.), rather than
simply converting from one format to another. For example,
converting a 4bit color GIF file to a 1bit Sun rasterfile
takes the following operations:

read GIF format
map color values to grayscale
adjust aspect ratio (1.2 --> 1.0)
scale image up to be visible (320x200 --> 640x480 or 1152x864)
optionally sharpen the image (edge enhancement)
optionally clean up "snow" in image (flip isolated pixels)
halftone (Blue noise, Floyd-Steinberg, Jarvis, Threshhold)
write Sun rasterfile format.

Inputs the following file formats

o Sun rasterfiles (1, 8, or 24 bits, color or grayscale)
o GIF files (1 to 8 bits, color or grayscale)
o Amiga IFF files (except HAM mode)
o PCX files
o PBM bitmaps
o Face files (CMU format for 1bit files by Bennet Yee)
o FBM files (my own format)

Outputs the following formats

o Sun rasterfiles
o FBM files
o GIF files (mapped color only)
o Amiga IFF files (except HAM mode)
o PBM (1bit files only)
o Face format (1bit files only)

With input converter for

o raw images (like Amiga Digi-View files)
o Targa By Ian MacPhedran
o PIC By Ian MacPhedran
o QRT By Butler Hines

With output converters for

o PostScript (1bit or 8bit grayscale files only)
o Diablo graphics (1bit files only)
o Targa By Ian MacPhedran

Operations

o Extract rectangle (optionally resizing and changing aspect ratio)
o Change density and contrast (color and grayscale)
o Rotate 90, 180, or 270 degrees
o Quantize 24 bit RGB images to 8..256 colors
Modified Heckbert median cut
o Halftone grayscale using
Ulichney's Blue Noise dithering
Floyd-Steinberg dithering
Jarvis's Constrained averaging
Threshholding
o Edge Sharpening by Digitial Laplacian (color or grayscale)
o Convert color to grayscale (or compute "gray" colormap
so grayscale images can be viewed on frame buffers)
o Compute histograms of grayscale images
o Sample 1bit images to convert to grayscale

Status

Beta test release, 0.9. "Use at your own risk, bug fixes not
guaranteed, be happy with minimal documentation." Bugs reported
so far have been fixed.

Availability

Anonymous FTP

Host: nl.cs.cmu.edu (128.2.222.56)
User: anonymous
Password: name@site
Directory: /usr/mlm/ftp/
Filename: fbm.tar.Z
Transfer: 'image'

Note: you must 'cd' to /usr/mlm/ftp directly, you cannot access
either /usr, or /usr/mlm alone. Don't forget to specify 'image'
format transfer.


http://www.vislist.com