LuaImg

LuaImg is an open source commandline tool for scripted (i.e. non-interactive) image manipulation. It has been used for a variety of tasks, including detecting aurorae in photos, creating skins/fonts/textures for computer games, extracting alpha masks from blended images, experimenting with fractals, and more. It supports a wide variety of image formats including animated GIFs and Direct Draw Surface (DDS).

As an image programming framework, LuaImg is ideal for complex, precise, or repetitive tasks that are too difficult or time-consuming to do in photoshop/gimp. It is more flexible than ImageMagick/Netpbm. It is much faster than Python and even easier to use.

LuaImg supports full HDR, since all images are stored in single precision floating point. Images are manipulated with a powerful yet high-level scripting language (based on the Lua fork from the Grit project). Image operations are consistent with layer blending modes from Gimp/Photoshop (but extended for HDR), mathematical operators are available, as well as convolutions, transformations, and per-pixel computations inspired by shader programming. It is also possible to draw images on other images (i.e. use 'brushes'), draw lines, and render text.

LuaImg strives firstly to allow all forms of image manipulation, secondly to be easy to use, and finally to be fast (via the customised Lua VM). Complex image processing algorithms can be expressed in a natural way through combinations of simple operations. Performance does not match cleverly optimised C++ code but is still good. A 5760x3840 image can be processed with per-pixel scripting in a few seconds.

LuaImg is an extension of the Lua language. The additional features provide good performance for computation involving compound floating point types (colours, coordinates, etc). The VM supports such types as primitives, instead of heap allocated and garbage collected objects.

These types are vector2, vector3, and vector4, the number representing the dimensionality. Literal values of these types look like vec(10,20) or vec(1,2,3,4). Individual fields can be accessed using .x, .y, .z, or .w field accesses (the fields can be read but not written). It is also possible to swizzle, e.g., .xyz will produce a vector3, .xz will produce a vector2, etc.

Arithmetic operations on the vector types operate in a point-wise manner, e.g. vec(1,2,3) * vec(-1,2,1) = vec(-1,4,3). The # operator on a vector provides its Euclidian length (Pythagoras).

Additionally, since most image manipulation involves math, all of the math functions have been made available in global scope and some of them have been lifted to operate on vector values (pow, ceil, floor, abs, clamp). The unpack function will convert vectors to their components. Additional functions like dot product, etc, are described in the LuaImg API documentation.

Finally, to facilitate text rendering, the Lua string library has been replaced by one that supports unicode. The new string library is based on ICU and is backwards compatible with the old string library except for the regular expression syntax, which is documented here.

All the old string functions are still present, but have been prefixed with an underscore, except len, which has been renamed byte. There are also two new functions, codepoint, which is similar to _char and returns the codepoints in the string, and getProperty("PROP") which fetches unicode properties by name.