i-am.ws

Sunday Dec 18, 2011

Alpha for PNG with NetPBM

As a co-developer of pnmtopng / pngtopnm it's already a long time my plan to update those two NetPBM programs for the PAM format, allowing for proper alpha channel support. On sourceforge you can find a pngtopam program — not sure how full featured it is — but there is currently no pamtopng, which is IMHO the more important of the two.

Two weeks ago I was myself in desperate need for a PAM to PNG converter, and I didn't have the time to do some proper development, therefore decided to do a quick & dirty one. Luckily I wrote 10+ years ago two PngMinus tools, which was targeting the same type of converters, but without the need for the NetPBM libraries.

Long story short, I wrote a "pam2png" utility, which is not as feature rich as a pamtopng program would be, but it does the job. Its main purpose is to convert 4-channel "RGB_ALPHA" pam images to png, but it does the conversion of 2-channel "GRAY_ALPHA" as well. However, the latter wasn't extensively tested.

To be honest, I stopped testing and debugging when the program was good enough for the images I needed to convert to PNG. And I will not spend too much more time on it, because the real goal is a proper pamtopng implementation. But if you find bugs, send me the fixes and I will incorporate them. Don't waste your time on adding functionality, because this is just a temporary job.

Finally, if you don't know how to create those PAM images with R+G+B+A channels, check out the pamstack command. This tool allows you to combine a regular RGB ppm image with an alpha channel image packaged in a pgm file. The README file in the tar-ball shows how to do it.

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