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Advanced Image-Processing in R

Bindings to ImageMagick: the most comprehensive open-source image processing library available. Supports many common formats (png, jpeg, tiff, pdf, etc) and manipulations (rotate, scale, crop, trim, flip, blur, etc). All operations are vectorized via the Magick++ STL meaning they operate either on a single frame or a series of frames for working with layers, collages, or animation. In RStudio images are automatically previewed when printed to the console, resulting in an interactive editing environment.

Hello World

Run examples in RStudio to see live previews of the images! If you do not use RStudio, use image_browse to open images. On Linux you can also use image_display to get an X11 preview.

library(magick)
frink <- image_read("https://jeroen.github.io/images/frink.png")
image_trim(frink)
image_scale(frink, "200x200")
image_flip(frink)
image_rotate(frink, 45) ## <-- result of this is shown
image_negate(frink)
frink |> 
  image_background("green") |> 
  image_flatten() |>
  image_border("red", "10x10")
image_rotate(frink, 45) |> image_write("man/figures/frink-rotated.png")

Effects

image_oilpaint(frink)
image_implode(frink)
image_charcoal(frink) ## <-- result of this is shown
image_blur(frink)
image_edge(frink)
image_charcoal(frink) |> image_write("man/figures/frink-charcoal.png")

Create GIF animation:

# Download images
oldlogo <- image_read("https://developer.r-project.org/Logo/Rlogo-2.png")
newlogo <- image_read("https://jeroen.github.io/images/Rlogo-old.png")
logos <- c(oldlogo, newlogo)
logos <- image_scale(logos, "400x400")

# Create GIF
(animation1 <- image_animate(logos))
image_write(animation1, "man/figures/anim1.gif")

# Morph effect  <-- result of this is shown
(animation2 <- image_animate(image_morph(logos, frames = 10)))
image_write(animation2, "man/figures/anim2.gif")

Read GIF animation frames. See the rotating earth example GIF.

earth <- image_read("https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Rotating_earth_%28large%29.gif")
length(earth)
earth[1]
earth[1:3]
earth1 <- rev(image_flip(earth)) ## How Australians see earth
image_write(earth1, "man/figures/earth1.gif") ## <-- result of this is shown

R logo with dancing banana

logo <- image_read("https://www.r-project.org/logo/Rlogo.png")
banana <- image_read("https://jeroen.github.io/images/banana.gif")
front <- image_scale(banana, "300")
background <- image_scale(logo, "400")
frames <- lapply(as.list(front), function(x) image_flatten(c(background, x)))
image_write(image_animate(image_join(frames)), "man/figures/Rlogo-banana.gif")

Use magick in Shiny Apps

This demo application shows how to use magick with shiny: https://github.com/jeroen/shinymagick

Installation

Binary packages for macOS or Windows can be installed directly from CRAN:

Installation from source on Linux or OSX requires the imagemagick Magick++ library. On Debian or Ubuntu install libmagick++-dev:

sudo apt-get install -y libmagick++-dev

On Fedora, CentOS or RHEL we need ImageMagick-c++-devel. However on CentOS the system version of ImageMagick is quite old. More recent versions are available from the ImageMagick downloads website.

sudo yum install ImageMagick-c++-devel

On macOS use imagemagick@6 from Homebrew.

brew install imagemagick@6

The unversioned homebrew formulaimagemagick can also be used, however it has some unsolved OpenMP problems.

There is also a fork of imagemagick called graphicsmagick, but this doesn’t work for this package.