Difficult-o-Meter: 2 (light Linux skill required)Covers:
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Question: I'm thinking of putting together a Web site, and I want to put a bunch of images on it: my vacation photographs, baby pictures, the newspaper photo where my face was in the corner, and so on. How can I use Linux to help me make those images look good?
Answer: Learn about digital imagery, and then get familiar with the variety of image manipulation tools that come with your Linux system.
The rise of the World Wide Web has opened a world of rich content that is accessible at the click of a mouse. On many modern Web sites, administrators often find that the most requested files are, contrary to expectation, not HTML files. Instead, they are images! Considering the ubiquity and importance of image files, Web site designers should take care to understand how digital images work, how they are stored, and how they can be manipulated.
Linux provides a number of powerful tools that make it an excellent platform for image processing. And this means more than just making images for a Web site: It can include document archiving and preservation, scene rendering and creation of textures for computer games , artistic endeavors, and optical character recognition, to name a few. In this chapter, we'll discuss some of the popular types of image formats, their strengths and weaknesses, and ways to convert between them. We'll then discuss various types of image retouching, primarily oriented toward Web presentation. And we'll learn how to use various Linux tools along the way.