GraphicsMagick is a comprehensive image processing and 2D rendering system.

GraphicsMagick is a robust collection of tools and libraries which support reading, writing, and manipulating an image in over 88 major formats including popular formats like TIFF, JPEG-2000, PNG, PDF, PhotoCD, JPEG, SVG, and GIF.

GraphicsMagick supports creating new images on the fly, making it suitable for building dynamic Web applications. GraphicsMagick may be used to resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image and save the result in the same or differing image format. Image processing operations are available from the command line, as well as through C, C , Perl, or Windows COM programming interfaces. Extensions are available from third-parties to support programming in Borland's Delphi, Java, PHP, Python, Scheme, Tcl, and Ruby.

GraphicsMagick is copyrighted by the GraphicsMagick Group as well as many others. GraphicsMagick is dististributed under a MIT-style License, which is approved by the Open Source Initiative and is compatible with the GPL.

GraphicsMagick is originally derived from ImageMagick 5.5.2. Since the branch from ImageMagick, many improvements have been made (see news) by many authors using an open development model. GraphicsMagick is available for free, may be used to support both open and proprietary applications, and may be redistributed without fee.

Here are some key features of "GraphicsMagick":

· Convert an image from one format to another (e.g. TIFF to JPEG)
· Resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image
· Create a montage of image thumbnails
· Create a transparent image suitable for use on the Web
· Turn a group of images into a GIF animation sequence
· Create a composite image by combining several separate images
· Draw shapes or text on an image
· Decorate an image with a border or frame
· Describe the format and characteristics of an image

GraphicsMagick is quite portable, and compiles under almost every general purpose operating system that runs on 32-bit or 64-bit CPUs. GraphicsMagick is available for virtually any Unix or Unix-like system, including Linux. It also runs under Windows '98 and later ('98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, and XP), and MacOS-X. Ports exists for MacOS 9 and VMS but the ports lack a maintainer and have not been tested for several years (please volunteer!).

What's New in This Release:

Bug fixes:

· TIFF: Eliminated a memory leak in the codec support detection code.
· JPEG: Removed over-write of image->client_data.
· PNG: Fixed crash when writing PNG images with transparency and either optimize is requested, or the image is colormapped.

Feature improvements:

· A file extension proxy module is used to automatically map from common camera raw format extensions to dcraw so that camera RAW images are loaded automatically using 'dcraw' or similar program as defined via the 'dcraw' entry in delegates.mgk.

· ThresholdImage() uses a new implementation backported from the development version which attempts to avoid unnecessary image updates.