Find out how to Create a Diff of Two Photographs

Once I was a baby, I cherished on the lookout for Waldo within the “The place’s Waldo?” ebook sequence. Nowadays I am a sucker for TMZ’s “What is the Huge Frigin Distinction” photographs, the place TMZ barely adjustments a picture and you need to spot the variations between the 2. That received me to considering — how simply might I automate diff’ing two photographs? This StackOverflow put up was gold.

To create a diff of two comparable photographs, we’ll use ImageMagick’s convert command line utility with a big host of configurations:

convert '(' image1.png -flatten -grayscale Rec709Luminance ')' 
        '(' image2.png -flatten -grayscale Rec709Luminance ')' 
        '(' -clone 0-1 -compose darken -composite ')' 
        -channel RGB -combine diff.png

How efficient is that this command with its configuration arguments? Let’s take a look:

Authentic Picture

Modified Picture

Diff’ed Picture

The diff picture result’s fairly informative! The dimensions of the sun shades is clearly introduced, and when you look intently, you possibly can see one cranium on the top-right of the shirt has been flipped.

No matter your purpose for eager to determine the distinction two photographs, ImageMagick’s convert software is spectacular. You possibly can do 1,000,000 issues with ImageMagick; try my Media tutorials to study extra superior methods to switch photographs, movies, and audio!