ppmnorm

pnmnorm(1)                  General Commands Manual                 pnmnorm(1)

NAME
       pnmnorm - normalize the contrast in a Netbpm image

SYNOPSIS
       pnmnorm [-bpercent N | -bvalue N] [-wpercent N | -wvalue N] [-keephues]
       [-brightmax]

       [ppmfile]

       All options can be abbreviated to their shortest  unique  prefix.   You
       may use two hyphens instead of one to designate an option.  You may use
       either white space or an equals sign between an  option  name  and  its
       value.

DESCRIPTION
       Reads a PNM image (PBM, PGM, or PPM).  Normalizes the contrast by forc-
       ing the lightest pixels to white, the darkest pixels to black, and lin-
       early rescaling the ones in between; and produces the same kind of file
       as output.  This is pretty useless for a PBM image.

       The program first determines a mapping of old brightness to new bright-
       ness.   For each possible brightness of a pixel, the program determines
       a corresponding brightness for the output image.

       Then for each pixel in the image, the program computes  a  color  which
       has  the desired output brightness and puts that in the output.  With a
       color image, it is not always possible to compute such a color and  re-
       tain  any  semblance  of the original hue, so the brightest and dimmest
       pixels may only approximate the desired brightness.

       Note that for a PPM image, this is different from separately  normaliz-
       ing the individual color components.

OPTIONS
       By  default,  the  darkest 2 percent of all pixels are mapped to black,
       and the lightest 1 percent are mapped to white.  You can override these
       percentages  by  using  the  -bpercent  and -wpercent flags, or you can
       specify the exact pixel values to be mapped by using  the  -bvalue  and
       -wvalue  flags.   Appropriate  numbers for the flags can be gotten from
       the ppmhist tool.  If you just  want  to  enhance  the  contrast,  then
       choose  values  at elbows in the histogram; e.g. if value 29 represents
       3% of the image but value 30 represents 20%, choose 30 for bvalue.   If
       you  want  to  lighten  the image, then set bvalue to 0 and just fiddle
       with wvalue; similarly, to darken the image, set wvalue to  maxval  and
       play with bvalue.

       The  -keephues  option says to keep each pixel the same hue as it is in
       the input; just adjust its intensity.  By default,  pnmnorm  normalizes
       contrast  in  each  component independently (except that the meaning of
       the -wpercent and -bpercent options are based on the  overall  intensi-
       ties  of  the  colors, not each component taken separately).  So if you
       have a color which is intensely red but dimly green, pnmnorm would make
       the  red  more intense and the green less intense, so you end up with a
       different hue than you started with.

       If you specify -keephues, pnmnorm would likely leave this pixel  alone,
       since its overall intensity is medium.

       -keephues  can  cause  clipping, because a certain color may be below a
       target intensity while one  of  its  components  is  saturated.   Where
       that's  the  case, pnmnorm uses the maximum representable intensity for
       the saturated component and the pixel ends up with less overall  inten-
       sity, and a different hue, than it is supposed to have.

       This option is meaningless on grayscale images.

       Before March 2002, there was no -keephues option.

       The -brightmax option says to use the intensity of the most intense RGB
       component of a pixel as the pixel's brightness.   By  default,  pnmnorm
       uses the luminosity of the color as its brightness.

       This option is meaningless on grayscale images.

       Before March 2002, there was no -brightmax option.

SEE ALSO
       ppmhist(1), pgmhist(1), pnmgamma(1), ppmbrighten(1), ppmdim(1), pnm(5)

                                7 October 1993                      pnmnorm(1)