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When people compare ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick (or other similar libraries) they tend to focus on performance. I'm far more concerned, however, with the quality of the results, and don't really care if one library takes 10 times as long as another. If I were choosing between

  • ImageMagick & RMagick
  • GraphicsMagick
  • FreeImage & Image Science
  • Anything else you want to alert me to

which one would be likely to give results that compare favorably with Photoshop? I'm concerned about quality because some recent work with ImageMagick gave some not-so-good results.

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iconoclast
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  • Can you be a little more specific about the not-so-good results you've seen? Certainly no library strives to be poor quality. – Mark Ransom Dec 27 '12 at 22:11
  • Resizing JPEGs, even with a fairly high quality setting, got me poor results. With 85% quality, they looked to me more like 65% quality. That was using ImageMagick from Drupal, so it's possible the fault is somehow with Drupal. (One more reason I want to do it from Ruby, where in the very least I'll have a lot more control.... I'm sure the Drupal crowd is gonna flame me now...) – iconoclast Dec 27 '12 at 23:00
  • How specifically you resized your image ? There is a huge difference between upscaling and downscaling in terms of visual appearance. Also, you will have much better control using the command line tools provided by ImageMagick rather than language bindings to it. Most likely you are just not using the correct options, but you didn't include how you did the resizing using ImageMagick, neither the input and output you got. – mmgp Dec 28 '12 at 14:36
  • I downscaled it, but you don't really control options when you use Drupal. Drupal squeezes everything through a very simplified UI (hence my desire to do it from Ruby instead). It's designed to be usable by people who are afraid to code, which IMHO is a big problem. The deal is that Drupal *uses* ImageMagick, but makes no attempt to expose the ImageMagick API. It offers a few resizing options but is not a general purpose ImageMagick tool. So it may be that the quality is from whoever programmed the Drupal Image module, and maybe not the fault at all of ImageMagick itself. – iconoclast Dec 29 '12 at 23:17
  • It's also possible that the version of ImageMagick is at fault. I checked the version installed on the Drupal server and it is 6.x. with a copyright date (if I remember correctly) of 2006. – iconoclast Dec 29 '12 at 23:19
  • Should I infer from this discussion that all the above libraries are equivalent in quality, and only differ in features/scope and in performance/memory management? – iconoclast Dec 29 '12 at 23:19
  • Which one is faster? – skan Jun 07 '17 at 12:34

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