There are hundreds of different image formats. Converting from one format to another is a frequent source of problems and frustration. For general information and tips on image conversion see http://www.msi.umn.edu/user_support/scivis/image/im-conversion.htm .
The Supercomputing Institute has many image conversion tools, listed below
Adobe Photoshop allows you to create color images and edit all or part of an existing images. With Photoshop you can add text, change the color balance, replace colors, change the brightness, blur or sharpen, and adjust an image or part of an image in hundreds of different ways. Photoshop can also resize or change the resolution of an image. It is the most powerful image manipulation tool at the Institute.. Manuals are available in the Institute's library.
Photoshop supports only a few image formats. These include PICT, EPS and TIFF. For best results on images produced on an SGI workstation, convert it to TIFF and then ftp it to the Macintosh for use in Photoshop. Likewise, in Photoshop, save it as in the TIFF format, before sending it to an SGI workstation.
Version: 4.0
Labs: Scientific Development and Visualization Lab
System(s): The Macintosh m2
Categories: Image Conversion, Image Display, Image Processing
Ghostscript (gs) is an interpreter for PostScript. It can be used to translate Postscript to other formats. More often, it is used by other programs to convert a PostScript document to another format and its use is transparent to the user (e.g. The image display programs xv and display use ghostscript). For more information, see the ghostscript man page (man gs).
Rather than using ghostscript directly, ghostview is often used instead. Ghostview provides a user X11 user interface to ghostscript. From ghostview, you can view a PostScript document or image, and save or print selected pages. For more information, see the ghostview man page (man ghostview).
Version: Ghostview: 1.5, Ghostscript 2.6.2 (Med-Chem) Alladin
Ghostscript 4.03 (SDVL, BSCL)
Labs:
Scientific Development and Visualization Lab,
Medicinal Chemistry/Supercomputing Institute Visualization-Workstation
Laboratory, Basic Sciences Computing Lab
System(s): all SGI workstations
Categories:Image Conversion, Image Display
ImageMagick is a collection of programs to display, manipulate and convert images from one format to another. It can handle many different image formats, including PostScript, GIF, JPEG, TIFF, PICT,and SGI's rgb. The following table briefly describes each ImageMagick program. For more information, see the man page for ImageMagick ( man imagemagick) or the man page for the specific program (e.g. man display).
| Program | Uses Include: |
|---|---|
| display | Display an image, interactivel manipulplate colors and color map, reflect, rotate, resize, crop, annotate, convert format. |
| montage | Create a tiling of several images. |
| convert | Convert from one image format to another. |
| mogrify | Transforms an image or sequence of images. Trahsformations include resizing, rotation, color reduction. |
| animate | Display a sequence of images |
| import | Capture all or part of the screen. |
| combine | Combine two or more images |
| segment | segments an image by analyzing the histograms of the color components and identifying units that are homogeneous with the fuzzy c-means technique. |
| identify | Print out information about the image (Size, type, ...). |
Version: 4.1.0(SDVL and BSCL), 3.6.5(MedChem)
Labs: Scientific Development and Visualization Lab,
Medicinal Chemistry/Supercomputing Institute Visualization-Workstation
Laboratory, Basic Sciences Computing Lab
System(s): all SGI workstations
Categories: Image Display, Image Processing, Image Conversion,
Animation
A collection of tools for displaying, converting and manipulating images. Unlike most image manipulation software, Imgworks and imgview allow adjustments to the color balance by interactively manipulating the red, blue and green components. Formats are somewhat limited. The current release supports FIT,SGI, JFIF, TIFF, GIF and PhotoCD(read only). See the individual man pages for more information (e.g. man imgworks).
Imgworks is used to interactively manipulate images. With imgworks, you can rotate, reflect, crop and resize an image. You can also convert color to monochrome, adjust the contrast, color balance and saturation. Imgworks can also be used to convert an image to GIF. While converting, the number of colors can be reduced or a transparent background can be interactively added.
Imgview is used to view an image. It can also be used to adjust red, blue and green color components, and to convert image formats.
Imgcopy converts an image from one format to another. Imginfo displays information about the image, including size and color model. Imgformats just lists the available formats.
Version:Imgworks: 2.2(SDVL) 2.3(BSCL), Imgview: 2.1
Labs: Scientific Development and Visualization Lab,
Basic Sciences Computing Lab
System(s): all SGI workstations
Categories:Image Conversion, Image Display, Image Processing
A collection of tools for displaying and converting Inventor files
| Program | Function |
|---|---|
| ivview | Displays an Inventor file |
| ivcat | Concatenates Inventor files. Converts from ASCII to binary Inventor, or binary to ASCII |
| ivfix | Restructures an Inventor object for improved performance |
| ivinfo | Prints out information about an Inventor file |
| ivToVRML | Converts Inventor files to VRML format. |
| iv2toiv1 | Converts an Inventor 2.0 file to Inventor 1.0 |
| ivdowngrade | Converts an Inventor 2.0 file to Inventor 1.0 |
Labs: Scientific Development and Visualization Lab, Basic Sciences Computing Lab
System(s): all SGI workstations
Categories: Image Display, Image Conversion
Use Mediaconvert to convert movies to and from Quicktime movies , MPEG movies and SGI's movie formats. Documentation is online through the insight library. Type insight to start, then double click on "Digital Media Tools Guide" for more information. Caution: Mediaconvert fails to convert movies into MPEG movies, if the dimensions of the original images are not multiples of 16.
To use mediaconvert, type mediaconvert.
Labs: Scientific Development and Visualization Lab,
Medicinal Chemistry/Supercomputing Institute Visualization-Workstation Laboratory
System(s): all SGI workstations
Categories: Image Conversion, Animation
Movieconvert converts a movie file into a group of separate images, and to convert movies from one format to another. Movieconvert will also crop or resize images, and convert from one image format to another. Documentation is online through the insight library. Type insight to start, then double click on "Digital Media Tools Guide" for more information.
To use movieconvert, type movieconvert.
Labs: Scientific Development and Visualization Lab,
Medicinal Chemistry/Supercomputing Institute Visualization-Workstation Laboratory
System(s): all SGI workstations
Categories: Image Conversion, Animation
Moviemaker is used to create movies from individual images. Moviemaker can read in a variety of image formats, including tiff and SGI's RGB format. For the most part, the movies are output in one of SGI's movie formats. From here, movieconvert and mediaconvert can be used to get a sequence of image files from the movie and to convert the movie to other formats, such as MPEG and Quicktime. Documentation is online through the insight library. Type insight to start, then double click on "Digital Media Tools Guide" for more information.
To use moviemaker, type moviemaker.
Labs: Scientific Development and Visualization Lab,
Medicinal Chemistry/Supercomputing Institute Visualization-Workstation Laboratory
System(s): all SGI workstations
Categories: Image Conversion, Animation
Netpbm is a collection image conversion tools which allow users to convert almost any image type to the intermediate PBM format, and from the PBM format to just about any other type. Typical names for the utilities are giftoppm to convert a GIF-formatted image to PPM, and ppmtogif, a program to convert from PPM format to GIF. man pages for all of the PBM utilities are available on-line. A list of the various utilities is available by typing man -k pbm, man -k ppm, and man -k pnm.
Revision: march 1994 (netpbm)
Version:March 1994
Labs: Scientific Development and Visualization Lab,
Basic Sciences Computing Lab
System(s): all SGI workstations
Categories:Image Conversion, Image Processing
The program ralcgm displays Computer Graphics Metafiles (cgm files) and converts them to PostScript or to a binary encoding. For more information, see the ralcgm man page (man ralcgm).
Version: 3.0
Labs:
Scientific Development and Visualization Lab,
Basic Sciences Computing Lab
Categories:Image Conversion, Image Display
The SDSC image tools are tools developed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to handle image manipulation and file format conversion for a wide range of file formats. There are a number of programs to handle the different operations available. One widely used program is imconv, which is used to convert from one image format to another. For more information, see the individual man pages (e.g. man imconv ). The following table summarizes the individual tools.
| Program | Function |
|---|---|
| imconv | Convert from one image format to another |
| imcopy | Copy a portion of an input image to an output image |
| imfile | Prints out the type of the image |
| imflip | Reflect an image in a horizontal or vertical axis |
| imgray | Convert an image to grayscale |
| immono | Convert an image to monochrome |
| impaste | Paste an image on top of another |
| imscale | Resize an image |
Version: 3.0.0
Labs: Scientific Development and Visualization Lab, Basic Sciences
Computing Lab
System(s): all SGI workstations
Categories: Image Conversion, Image Processing
SGI provides a several conversion tools to convert images from SGI's rgb format to and from various other formats. The following is a list of the current to/from conversion programs.
fromalias fromgif fromtarga frombin frommac fromxbm fromcmap frompic fromxwd fromcube fromppm fromyuv fromdi fromrla fromface fromsun togif tops tomac toscitex toalias tonews tosun toascii top totarga tobin topict toyuv tobw toppmFor more information, see the various man pages, e.g. man fromsun,
Labs: Scientific Development and Visualization Lab,
Medicinal Chemistry/Supercomputing Institute Visualization-Workstation
Laboratory, Basic Sciences Computing Lab
System(s): all SGI workstations
Categories: Image Conversion
XV is used to display, manipulate and convert images from one format to another. XV reads and writes images in many formats including PostScript, GIF, JPEG, TIFF, and SGI's rgb. XV can be used to interactively resize, crop, reflect and rotate images. Documentation is in /usr/local/docs/xv.ps (ghostview /usr/local/docs/xv.ps).
Version: 3.10a
Labs: Scientific Development and Visualization Lab,
Medicinal Chemistry/Supercomputing Institute Visualization-Workstation
Laboratory, Basic Sciences Computing Lab
System(s): all SGI workstations
Categories: Image Conversion, Image Display, Image Processing
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