I started working on the mini-site for an Audiobulb compilation that’s been in the works for a number of years. The fun part is putting together the art from scans of the booklets and playing around with imagemagick pipelines.

From a directory of GIMP project files, flatten the layers and then process them into a chunky dithered monochrome. The imagemagick pipeline boosts brightness 35% and contrast 45%, then scales the image down to 19%, converts it to monochrome dithered with everyone’s favorte Floyd Steinberg algorithm, and then resized without interpolation (the -filter point part near the end) to upscale back again to the original size. The last step is really for printing the next version of the booklets which are based on scans of the previous version. I’m using the same pipeline without the very last bit for the web images so far. They look suitably crappy but still readable.

#!/bin/bash
scale=19
blowout=35x45
restore=$(python -c "print(round(10000 / $scale))")
for f in ./*.xcf; do
    filename=$(basename "$f" .xcf)
    convert "$f" -flatten "$filename-bw.png"
done

mogrify -brightness-contrast ${blowout} -resize ${scale}% -monochrome -dither FloydSteinberg -filter point -resize ${restore}% *-bw.png