Ubuntu Manpage: pamdepth - change the depth (color resolution) in a Netpbm image

NAME

       pamdepth - change the depth (color resolution) in a Netpbm image

SYNOPSIS

       pamdepth newmaxval [netpbmfile]

DESCRIPTION

This program is part of Netpbm(1).

pamdepth reads a Netpbm image as input, changes its depth (color resolution), and writes
out the resulting Netpbm image. I.e. the output has a different maxval from the input,
but all the same colors (apart from rounding error).

Reducing the depth results in some loss of information.

Here is an example of the effect at the image format level: Assume you start with an image
with maxval 100 and sample values of 50 and 100. You tell pamdepth to change it to depth
150. The output has maxval 200 and sample values 75 and 150.

This program works on multi-image streams.

Be careful of off-by-one errors when choosing the new maxval. For instance, if you want
the color values to be five bits wide, use a maxval of 31, not 32.

One important use of pamdepth is to convert a new format 2-byte-per-sample PNM file to the
older 1-byte-per-sample format. Before April 2000, essentially all raw (binary) format
PNM files had a maxval less than 256 and one byte per sample, and many programs may rely
on that. If you specify a newmaxval less than 256, the resulting file should be readable
by any program that worked with PNM files before April 2000.

Output Format
The output format (PBM, etc.) and, in the case of PAM, tuple type, of the output is
usually the same as the input.

However, changing the depth of a black and white image does not make sense, except to turn
it into a grayscale image, so if the input is a black and white image, pamdepth makes the
output grayscale. To be more precise, if the input is a PBM image, the output is PGM, and
if the input is a PAM with tuple type BLACK_AND_WHITE or BLACK_AND_WHITE_ALPHA, the output
is a PAM with tuple type GRAYSCALE or GRAYSCALE_ALPHA, respectively.

This conversion happens even if the new maxval is 1.

Before Netpbm 10.92 (September 2020), pamdepth failed if the input was PAM with a black
and white tuple type and the new maxval was anything but 1. But it always promoted PBM to
PGM.

OPTIONS

       There are no command line options defined specifically for pamdepth, but it recognizes the
       options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (See
        Common Options ⟨index.html#commonoptions⟩ .)

HISTORY

       pamdepth was new in Netpbm 10.32 (February 2006).  It replaced pnmdepth, by Jef Poskanzer.
       pamdepth  is  backward  compatible with pnmdepth and adds the ability to process arbitrary
       PAM images and the ability to process multi-image input streams.   pnmdepth  handled  only
       PNM images and ignored all but the first in any stream.

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