Provided by: netpbm_11.01.00-2build1_amd64 
NAME
pnmremap - replace colors in a PNM image with colors from another set
SYNOPSIS
pnmremap
-mapfile=palettefile
[-floyd|-fs|-nfloyd|-nofs]
{[-norandom]|randomseed=n}
[-firstisdefault]
[-verbose]
[-missingcolor=colorspec]
[pnmfile]
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
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
pnmremap replaces the colors in an input image with those from a palette you specify.
Where colors in the input are present in the palette, they just stay the same in the
output. But where the input contains a color that is not in the palette, pnmremap gives
you these choices:
• Choose the closest color from the palette.
• Choose the first color from the palette.
• Use a color specified by a command option (-missing).
• Dither. This means rather than mapping pixel by pixel, pnmremap uses colors from
the palette to try to make multi-pixel regions of the output have the same average
color as the input (for another kind of dithering, see ppmdither).
Two reasons to use this program are: 1) you want to reduce the number of colors in the
input image; and 2) you need to feed the image to something that can handle only certain
colors.
To reduce colors, you can generate the palette with pnmcolormap.
By default, pnmremap maps an input color that is not in the palette to the closest color
that is in the palette. Closest means with the smallest Cartesian distance in the red,
green, blue brightness space (smallest sum of the squares of the differences in red,
green, and blue ITU-R Recommendation BT.709 gamma-adjusted intensities).
You can instead specify a single default color for pnmremap to use for any color in the
input image that is not in the palette. Use the -missing option for this.
You can also specify that the first color in the palette image is the default. Use the
-firstisdefault option for this.
The palette is simply a PNM image. The colors of the pixels in the image are the colors
in the palette. Where the pixels appear in the image, and the dimensions of the image,
are irrelevant. Multiple pixels of the same color are fine. However, a palette image is
typically a single row with one pixel per color.
If you specify -missing, the color you so specify is in the palette in addition to
whatever is in the palette image.
For historical reasons, Netpbm sometimes calls the palette a "colormap." But it doesn't
really map anything. pnmremap creates its own map, based on the palette, to map colors
from the input image to output colors.
Palette/Image Type Mismatch
In the simple case, the palette image is of the same depth (number of planes, i.e. number
of components in each tuple (pixel)) as the input image and pnmremap just does a
straightforward search of the palette for each input tuple (pixel). In fact, pnmremap
doesn't even care if the image is a visual image.
But what about when the depths differ? In that case, pnmremap converts the input image
(in its own memory) to match the palette and then proceeds as above.
There are only two such cases in which pnmremap knows how to do the conversion: when one
of them is tuple type RGB, depth 3, and the other is tuple type GRAYSCALE or
BLACKANDWHITE, depth 1; and vice versa.
In any other case, pnmremap issues and error message and fails.
Note that as long as your input and palette images are PNM, they'll always fall into one
of the cases pnmremap can handle. There's an issue only if you're using some exotic PAM
image.
Before Netpbm 10.27 (March 2005), pnmremap could not handle the case of a palette of
greater depth than the input image. (It would issue an error message and fail in that
case). You can use ppmtoppm to increase the depth of the input image to work around this
limitation.
In any case, the output image has the same tuple type and depth as the palette image.
Multiple Image Stream
pnmremap handles a multiple image input stream, producing a multiple image output stream.
The input images need not be similar in any way.
Before Netpbm 10.30 (October 2005), pnmremap ignored any image after the first.
Examples
pnmcolormap testimg.ppm 256 >palette.ppm
pnmremap -map=palette.ppm testimg.ppm >reduced_testimg.ppm
To limit colors to a certain set, a typical example is to create an image for posting on
the World Wide Web, where different browsers know different colors. But all browsers are
supposed to know the 216 "web safe" colors which are essentially all the colors you can
represent in a PPM image with a maxval of 5. So you can do this:
pamseq 3 5 >websafe.pam
pnmremap -map=websafe.pam testimg.ppm >websafe_testimg.ppm
Another useful palette is one for the 8 color IBM TTL color set, which you can create with
pamseq 3 1 >ibmttl.pam
If you want to quantize one image to use the colors in another one, just use the second
one as the palette. You don't have to reduce it down to only one pixel of each color,
just use it as is.
The output image has the same type and maxval as the palette image.
PARAMETERS
There is one parameter, which is required: The file specification of the input PNM file.
OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet,
see
Common Options ⟨index.html#commonoptions⟩ ), pnmremap recognizes the following command
line options:
-mapfile=palettefilename
This names the file that contains the palette image.
This option is mandatory.
-floyd
-fs
-nofloyd
-nofs These options determine whether pnmremap does Floyd-Steinberg dithering. Without
Floyd-Steinberg, pnmremap selects the output color of a pixel based on the color of
only the corresponding input pixel. With Floyd-Steinberg, pnmremap considers
regions of pixels such that the average color of a region is the same in the output
as in the input. The dithering effect appears as a dot pattern up close, but from
a distance, the dots blend so that you see more colors than are present in the
color map.
As an example, if your color map contains only black and white, and the input image
has 4 adjacent pixels of gray, pnmremap with Floyd-Steinberg would generate output
pixels black, white, black, white, which from a distance looks gray. But without
Floyd-Steinberg, pnmremap would generate 4 white pixels, white being the single-
pixel approximation of gray.
Floyd-Steinberg gives vastly better results on images where unmodified quantization
has banding or other artifacts, especially when going to a small number of colors
such as the above IBM set. However, it does take substantially more CPU time.
-fs is a synonym for -floyd. -nofs is a synonym for -nofloyd.
The default is -nofloyd.
Before Netpbm 10.46 (March 2009), dithering doesn't work quite as you expect if the
color map has a lower maxval than the input. pnmremap reduces the color resolution
to the color map's maxval before doing any dithering, so the dithering does not
have the effect of making the image, at a distance, appear to have the original
maxval. In current Netpbm, it does.
-norandom
This option affects a detail of the Floyd-Steinberg dithering process. It has no
effect if you aren't doing Floyd-Steinberg dithering.
By default, pnmremap initializes the error propagation accumulator to random values
to avoid the appearance of unwanted patterns. This is an extension of the original
Floyd-Steinberg algorithm.
A drawback of this is that the same pnmremap on the same input produces slightly
different output every time, which makes comparison difficult.
With -norandom, pnmremap initializes the error accumulators to zero and the output
is completely predictable.
Alternatively, you can use -randomseed to get randomization across the image, but
still have repeatable results.
You cannot specify this along with -randomseed.
-norandom was new in Netpbm 10.39 (June 2007).
-randomseed=n
This option affects a detail of the Floyd-Steinberg dithering process. It has no
effect if you aren't doing Floyd-Steinberg dithering.
This option supplies the seed for the random number generator used in the
randomization process described in the explanation of the -norandom option. If you
run pnmremap twice with the same -randomseed value, you will get identical results.
If you do not specify -randomseed, pnmremap chooses a seed at random, adding
another level of randomness to the dithering.
You cannot specify this along with -norandom.
This option was new in Netpbm 10.82 (March 2018).
-firstisdefault
This tells pnmremap to map any input color that is not in the palette to the first
color in the palette (the color of the pixel in the top left corner of the palette
image)
See DESCRIPTION ⟨#description⟩ .
If you specify -firstisdefault, the maxval of your input must match the maxval of
your palette image.
-missingcolor=colorspec
This specifies the default color for pnmremap to map to a color in the input image
that isn't in the palette. color may or may not be in the palette image; it is
part of the palette regardless.
colorspec is as described for the argument of the pnm_parsecolor() library routine
⟨libnetpbm_image.html#colorname⟩ .
If you specify -missingcolor, the maxval of your input must match the maxval of
your palette image.
-verbose
Display helpful messages about the mapping process.
SEE ALSO
pnmcolormap(1), pamlookup(1), pnmquant(1), ppmquantall(1), pamdepth(1), ppmdither(1),
ppmquant(1), pamseq(1), ppm(1)
HISTORY
pnmremap first appeared in Netpbm 9.23 (January 2002). Before that, its function was
available only as part of the function of pnmquant (which was derived from the much older
ppmquant). Color quantization really has two main subfunctions, so Netpbm 9.23 split it
out into two separate programs: pnmcolormap and pnmremap and then Netpbm 9.24 replaced
pnmquant with a program that simply calls pnmcolormap and pnmremap.
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 by Jef Poskanzer.
DOCUMENT SOURCE
This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML source. The master
documentation is at
http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pnmremap.html