ImageMagick is an incredibly popular image processing library that a huge number of open source image editors make use of — the latest being Conjure.
Conjure is a Python-based GTK4/libadwaita app. It’s relatively early in development (consider it alpha-grade software) but it’s promising enough to deserve a few extra eyes (and hopefully hands, development wise) on it.
To quote its Flathub listing: “Magically transform your images with Conjure. Resize, crop, rotate, flip images, apply various filters and effects, adjust levels and brightness, and much more. An intuitive tool for designers, artists, or just someone who wants to enhance their images.”
Can’t really dispute that.
Conjure comes well-stocked with an array of graphical tricks and effects:
- Resize
- Crop
- Seam Carving
- Blur
- Despeckle
- Edge
- Emboss
- Kuwahara
- Shade
- Sharpen
- Vignette
- Spread
- Add Noise
- Blueshift
- Charcoal
- Colorize
- FX
- Implode
- Polaroid
- Sepia Tone
- Sketch
- Solarize
- Flop
- Rotation
- Statistic
- KMeans
- Wave
- Wavelet Denoise
- Enhance
- Flip
- Swirl
- Tint
Selecting an effect brings up a set of on-screen controls. Using these you can adjust, tweak, and fine-tune an effect to get a result of you liking (there’s a live updating preview, and for some effects a side-by-side comparison with how the image looks prior to the effect).
Once you’re happy with an effect click “Apply” to, well, apply it!
You can apply multiple effects in turn – just remember to hit “Apply” each time. After applying the first effect a thumbnail-sized history strip appears at the bottom of the app window. Use this to quickly revert to an earlier edit, if needed.
Finally, once you’re happy with how your creation looks, hit the “Save” button to save the image as a new file, saved in a location of your choice, with the file name you want, in the same image format as that of the original image.
In all, Conjure is a really promising app. It does two things well: 1) it fills the gap for people who want to do quick image edits without needing to open a full-blown, full-featured graphics app like The GIMP; and 2) its simple GUI means focus stays on the images being edited.
Do keep in mind Conjure is still alpha-grade at the time you read this (so it crashes a fair bit). But it’s an assured first step, one every app has to make. With more users and awareness of the app I’m sure it’ll develop — yes that’s a photo pun 😉 — into something magical.
• Get Conjure on Flathub.
