[magick-users] default depth of montage

[James Bigler]

I'm a big fan of ImageMagick, so thanks for sharing this cool work.

I used montage to stitch 3 images together.  The input images all had a 
depth of 8, but the resulting image from montage had a depth of 16.  I 
have some questions.

1.  Should montage output an image with the same depth as the input images?
2.  Is this is effect of the quantum size?
3.  Can I determine the quantum size from a command line utility?

montage -geometry 640x480 -tile 2x2 -frame 1 \
case1/t.ppm case3/t.ppm case7/t.ppm m.ppm

% head -3 case1/t.ppm case3/t.ppm case7/t.ppm m.ppm
==> case1/t.ppm <==
P6
700 509
255

==> case3/t.ppm <==
P6
700 509
255

==> case7/t.ppm <==
P6
700 509
255

==> m.ppm <==
P6
1284 964
65535

% montage --version
Version: ImageMagick 6.1.8 04/19/07 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2005 ImageMagick Studio LLC

This was on Suse 9.3.

==================================================================
It was extremely confusing to me to have montage output a 16 bit image 
when I fed it only 8 bit ones.

Once I determined that this was the case I was able to add "-depth 8" to 
the command line and get 8 bit images again.

Thanks,
James