Create a Blue Print effect in minutes

Create a Blue Print effect from existing images in minutes. All you need is ImageMagick and the Gnu Image Manipulation Program for minor touch up's. To achieve a photo realistic look you'll need to spend more time with Photoshop and a psdtuts tutorial. A Prime candidate for the Blue Print effect is an image with a uniform black or while background.

The first step is to create the paper background.
The commands below are part of a shell script and the $1 bash variable denotes a file name argument passed to the script.
To create the background board.jpg on the fly we need to know the original size of the image being converted. The size is determined using the command below.

rsize="$( convert ${1} -identify resolution | awk '{print $3}')"

Next we create a paper background using random noise and plasma, you see it really is magick!

convert -size ${rsize} xc: +noise Random board-noise.jpg
convert board-noise.jpg -size ${resize} -negate plasma:grey50-grey50 -shade 120x45 -blur 0x2 -colorspace Gray board.jpg

The background is now complete.
The next step is to convert the image to something more mono chromatic using this next magick command.

convert $1 -edge 1.4 -negate +dither -colors 2 -normalize -colorspace Gray -blur 0x.4 -contrast-stretch 0x45% ${1%*.*}_redux.png

The file name of the image will be converted to one with the suffix "_redux.png". The -edge detects the image edges using a radius of 1.4. This can be increased or decreased depending on how thick you want the edge to be.


The next step is to invert the colours and paint or -fill it blue '#0054a5'.

convert ${1%*.*}_redux.png -normalize -negate -fill '#0054a5' -opaque black ${1%*.*}_line.png

The Final stage is to merge the line image with a paper background using the composite image merging command.

composite -compose linear-light -watermark 60 -gravity Center board.jpg ${1%*.*}_line.png ${1%*.*}_bluelpt.png

Here we merge the background "board.jpg" image with the line art to produce the final blue print image. In the Next post I will package it into a shell script with a few extras thrown in.

So there! You have now used all of your cognative surplus for this week enjoy...