Useful Applications for manipulating/creating Images
Note that there are many, many more applications which can sometimes
be useful for manipulating images. The few listed here are selected
because they are very commonly used by our users and are fairly general
purpose packages for image manipulation. See the full list of
applications help pages to
get an idea of what other packages might be useful for your given
application.
- Photoshop
- Photoshop is probably the most popular image manipulation tool on Macintosh
and PC computers and a limited older version is available on our SGI machines.
Photoshop is a very comprehensive image manipulation package and supports a
large number of formats. Photoshop images can easily be transferred to or from
Unix and printed or used in other Unix applications. For using Photoshop
files in other applications, save the images in other formats such as
Tiff (.tiff) or Jpeg (.jpg). You may need to "flatten" the image in Photoshop
before saving it if you are using layers.
- GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program
- The GIMP is a freely available Unix (but is also available for other
systems) image manipulation package from the GNU project. The source code is
available and there are a large variety of modules written for it. It is
installed on the CGL cluster and various other of our machines. It has a
similar 'look and feel' to Photoshop and generally is used for the same
purposes.
- XV
- XV is a shareware (for personal use only) Unix tool written by John Bradley
at the University of Pennsylvania for manipulating images. The latest version
of XV, version 3.0, supports 24 bit color and the following image formats: GIF,
PM, PBM (.ppm), X11 Bitmap (.xbm), Sun Rasterfile (.ras), BMP, PostScript
(.ps), IRIS (.rgb), JPEG (.jpg) and TIFF (.tif). XV is a much more basic and
limited package than Photoshop but is also very easy to use. XV allows for the
graphical manipulation of images by scaling, color map manipulation, format
conversion, cropping, rotating, X Window capture, smoothing and dithering. On
the other hand, xv's scaling routines are not very good and
imscale generally does a preferrable job. Versions of xv prior
to version 3.0 did not support display of 24 bit color and thus should not be
used to manipulate 24 bit color images.
- Showcase
- Showcase is an easy to use multimedia presentation package from SGI and
only runs from the consoles of SGI machines. Showcase has good page layout
capabilities and allows you to import image files in the IRIS (.rgb) format.
Showcase also allows for the combining of images, text, and 3D objects.
Unfortunately, the only readily usable output format showcase supports
is PostScript so showcase is not a very good choice for manipulating
raster image files if the resulting file you need is also a raster image
file. You would need to use ps2img to conver the PostScript file
showcase can output to a raster image file and that would result in
a reduction of quality. However, if you are trying to create a document to
print, showcase may be an excellent choice as you would never have to
convert from PostScript to a raster image file format.
