Pngtopam User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Pngtopam User Manual(1)
NAME
pngtopam - convert a PNG image into a Netpbm image
SYNOPSIS
pngtopam [-verbose] [-alphapam | -alpha | -mix] [-background=color]
[-gamma=value] [-text=filename] [-time] [-byrow] [pngfile]
Minimum unique abbreviation of option is acceptable. You may use dou-
ble hyphens instead of single hyphen to denote options. You may use
white space in place of the equals sign to separate an option name from
its value.
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
pngtopam reads a PNG image (Portable Network Graphics) as input and
produces a Netpbm image as output. The type of the output file depends
on the input file - if it's black & white, pngtopam creates a PBM file.
If it's grayscale, pngtopam creates a PGM file. Otherwise, it creates
a PPM file. Except that with the -alphapam option, it always creates a
PAM file. That file has tuple type GRAYSCALE_ALPHA or RGB_ALPHA de-
pending on whether the input has color or not.
To convert in the other direction, use pamtopng or pnmtopng. The for-
mer is the more modern of the two and can recognize transparency infor-
mation in a PAM file, as you might generate with pngtopam -alphapam.
It has existed only since June 2015. The latter has more features, but
probably not ones that matter in the modern world.
OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
(most notably -quiet, see
Common Options ⟨index.html#commonoptions⟩ ), pngtopam recognizes the
following command line options:
-verbose
Display various information about the input PNG image and the
conversion process.
If you want even more information about the PNG image, use
pngcheck (not part of Netpbm).
-alphapam
Produce a single output image containing the main image (fore-
ground) and the transparency channel or transparency mask. This
image is in the PAM format with tuple type of either
GRAYSCALE_ALPHA (which has a depth of 2 channels) or RGB_ALPHA
(which has a depth of 4 channels).
You can specify only one of -alphapam, -alpha, and -mix. With
none of them, pngtopam produces an image of the foreground of
the input image and discards transparency information.
This option was new in Netpbm 10.44 (September 2008).
-alpha Output the transparency channel or transparency mask of the im-
age. The result is either a PBM file or a PGM file, depending on
whether different levels of transparency appear.
pngtopam discards the main image (the foreground).
You can specify only one of -alphapam, -alpha, and -mix. With
none of them, pngtopam produces an image of the foreground of
the input image and discards transparency information.
-mix Compose the image with the transparency or transparency mask
against a background. The background color is determined by the
bKGD chunk in the PNG, except that you can override it with
-background. If the PNG has no bKGD chunk and you don't specify
-background, the background color is white.
You can specify only one of -alphapam, -alpha, and -mix. With
none of them, pngtopam produces an image of the foreground of
the input image and discards transparency information.
-background=color
This option specifies the background color with which to mix the
image when you specify -mix.
color is as described for the argument of the pnm_parsecolor()
library routine ⟨libnetpbm_image.html#colorname⟩ .
Examples:
• -background=rgb:01/ff/80
• -background=rgbi:1/255/128
If you don't specify -background, the background color is what
is specified in the PNG image, and if the PNG doesn't specify
anything, white.
You cannot specify -background unless you also specify -mix.
Before Netpbm 10.27 (March 2005), you could specify -background
without -mix and it was just ignored. (This caused a usability
problem).
-gamma=value
This option causes pngtopam to respect the image gamma informa-
tion in the PNG file (from the gAMA chunk). Probably by histor-
ical accident, pngtopam ignores that information by default, as-
suming the image uses the same gamma transformation as a Netpbm
image, so the output image has different colors than the PNG
file actually represents if the PNG doesn't actually do that.
(However, it is rare for a PNG file to use a gamma transforma-
tion different from what the Netpbm formats specify, or if it
does, to specify with a gAMA chuck what that is).
But when you do specify -gamma, you get a rather strange addi-
tional function, probably a historical mistake: pngtopam incor-
porates the specified screen gamma value into the output pixels,
so that the samples in the Netpbm output deviate from the Netpbm
format specifications and are appropriate raw intensity values
to send to the display. This function essentially just exer-
cises the ability of the PNG library to make gamma corrections
to the pixels as it reads them from the PNG file to produce val-
ues appropriate for sending to a certain display in certain
viewing conditions. It's a strange function because it has
nothing to do with PNG and because in Netpbm, the normal way to
make gamma corrections appropriate for sending to a ceratin dis-
play in certain viewing conditions is with the program pngtopam,
applied to the normal output of pngtopam.
If you specify -gamma, but the PNG image does not specify what
gamma transformation it uses (there is no gAMA chunk), pngtopam
assumes a simple power transformation with an image gamma of
1.0. That is probably not not the actual image gamma; it is
much more likely to be .45.
Because the gammas of uncompensated monitors are around 2.6,
which results in an image-gamma of 0.45, some typical situations
are: when the image-gamma is 0.45 (use -verbose to check) and
the picture is too light, your system is gamma-corrected, so
convert with "-gamma 1.0". When no gAMA chunk is present or the
image-gamma is 1.0, use 2.2 to make the picture lighter and 0.45
to make the picture darker.
One oddity to be aware of when using -gamma on an image with
transparency: The PNG image specifies that a certain color is
transparent, i.e. every pixel in the image of that color is
transparent. But pngtopam interprets this as applying to the
gamma-corrected space, and there may be less precision in that
space than in the original, which means multiple uncorrected
colors map to the same corrected color. So imagine that the im-
age contains 3 shades of white (gray) and specifies that one of
them is transparent. After gamma correction, those three shades
are indistinguishable, so pngtopam considers pixels of all three
shades to be transparent.
-text=file
Writes the tEXt and zTXt chunks to a file, in a format as de-
scribed in the pnmtopng user manual. These chunks contain text
comments or annotations.
-time Prints the tIME chunk to stderr.
-byrow This option can make pngtopam run faster or in environments
where it would otherwise fail.
pngtopam has two ways to do the conversion from PNG to PAM, us-
ing respectively two facilities of the PNG library:
Whole Image
Decode the entire image into memory at once, using png_read_im-
age(), then convert to PAM and output row by row.
Row By Row
Read, convert, and output one row at a time using
png_read_row().
Whole Image is generally preferable because the PNG library does
more of the work, which means it understands more of the PNG
format possibilities now and in the future. Also, if the PNG is
interlaced, pngtopam does not know how to assemble the rows in
the right order.
Row By Row uses far less memory, which means with large images,
it can run in environments where Whole Image cannot and may also
run faster. And because Netpbm code does more of the work, it's
possible that it can be more flexible or at least give better
diagnostic information if there's something wrong with the PNG.
The Netpbm native code may do something correctly that the PNG
library does incorrectly, or vice versa.
In Netpbm, we stress function over performance, so by default
pngtopam uses Whole Image. You can select Row By Row with -by-
row if you want the speed or resource requirement improvement.
-byrow was new in Netpbm 10.54 (March 2011).
-orientraw
A TIFF stream contains raster data which can be arranged in the
stream various ways. Most commonly, it is arranged by rows,
with the top row first, and the pixels left to right within each
row, but many other orientations are possible.
The common orientation is the same on the Netpbm formats use, so
tifftopnm can do its jobs quite efficiently when the TIFF raster
is oriented that way.
But if the TIFF raster is oriented any other way, it can take a
considerable amount of processing for tifftopnm to convert it to
Netpbm format.
SEE ALSO
pamtopng(1), pnmtopng(1), pngtopnm(1), ptot, pnmgamma(1), pnm(1)
For information on the PNG format, see http://schaik.com/png
⟨http://schaik.com/png⟩ .
NOTE
A PNG image contains a lot of information that can't be represented in
Netpbm formats. Therefore, you lose information when you convert to
another format with "pngtopam | pnmtoxxx". If there is a specialized
converter that converts directly to the other format, e.g. ptot to con-
vert from PNG to TIFF, you'll get better results using that.
LIMITATIONS
There could be an option to include PNG comment chunks in the output
image as PNM comments instead of putting them in a separate file.
The program could be much faster, with a bit of code optimizing. As
with any Netpbm program, speed always takes a back seat to quick
present and future development.
HISTORY
pngtopam was new in Netpbm 10.44, as a replacement for pngtopnm. The
main improvement over pngtopnm was that it could generate a PAM image
with a transparency channel, whereas with pngtopnm, you would have to
extract the transparency channel as a separate file, in a separate run.
pngtopnm was new in Netpbm 8.1 (March 2000), the first big change to
the package in Netpbm's renaissance. It and pnmtopng were simply
copied from the pnmtopng package" (1) by Greg Roelofs. Those were
based on simpler reference applications by Alexander Lehmann
<alex@hal.rhein-main.de> and Willem van Schaik <willem@schaik.com> and
distributed with their PNG library.
Nearly all of the code has changed since it was copied from the pnm-
topng package, most of it just to improve maintainability.
AUTHORS
Copyright (C) 1995-1997 by Alexander Lehmann and Willem van Schaik.
DOCUMENT SOURCE
This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML
source. The master documentation is at
http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pngtopam.html
netpbm documentation 22 July 2008 Pngtopam User Manual(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.15 on Sat Jun 29 02:08:51 CEST 2024.