[magick-users] Suggestion to Digital Photo Handling section, part 1

[- Tong -]

Hi Anthony,

I've got some suggestions to your Digital Photo Handling section.
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/photos/

FYI, If you still remember me, I'm the one who asked your help on
producing the neon glowing effect.

The effect can also help produce the effect that real camera
imprinting date onto the films, not digital camera imprint date on
pictures -- the difference is the glowing effect.

As we know, most digital camera won't imprint date on the
pictures, so I think you may want to add how to do this to your
digital photo handling section. Thanks to your help, I managed to
create such glowing date imprints onto my digital photos. I am
satisfied with the result, and from now on I won't let digital
camera do it for me even if it can, because I believe date
imprinted this way looks much better. Still, I consider it in
pilot stage, and writing to ask for your comments.

Fist some background,

- I set my picture size on my digital camera to be 1600x1200. I
think this is the size that can give enough details (normally
portrait, not scenery), even for digital printing. What's your
opinion?

- From experiment, I found that using 32 point font size is good
for date imprinting for 1600x1200 images. What's your opinion?

Now here is how I did it:

Grap floriade.jpg from
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-graf/floriade.jpg

then, 

 convert -resize 1600x1200 floriade.jpg floriade.big.jpg
 convert -gravity NorthEast -crop 640x480+0+0 floriade.big.jpg floriade-NE.jpg

 fg=gold
 ft=basicdots.ttf
 fs=32
 wd=2007-06-17

 convert -size 300x60 xc:none -font $ft -pointsize $fs -gravity center -stroke black -strokewidth 2 -annotate 0 "$wd" -channel RGBA -blur 0x2 -stroke none -fill $fg -annotate 0 "$wd" -blur 0x2 -annotate 0 "$wd" +size floriade-NE.jpg +swap -gravity NorthEast -geometry +50+40 -composite dated.pic.jpg

I noticed that all the strokewidth/blur setting really related to
the point font size that we choose. This is the setting I found 
satisfying, via experiment. I want the settings to be enough to make 
the difference, but just enough as not to interfere with the original
photo. FYI, I put the test result file at
http://xpt.sourceforge.net/download/dated.pic.jpg

I'll like your comment before proceeding. E.g., is font size 32 really
looks good on floriade.big.jpg? etc.

Thanks

-- 
Tong (remove underscore(s) to reply)
  http://xpt.sf.net/techdocs/
  http://xpt.sf.net/tools/