Image::BioChrome(3)

NAME
Image::BioChrome - Colorise gif files by rewriting the color table

This module is still considered ALPHA code, the module and interfaces are still subject to change.

SYNOPSIS
        my $bio = new Image::BioChrome $file;

        $bio->colors(.....);

        or

        $bio->alphas(.....);

        or

        $bio->percents(100, 100, 50)

        $bio->write_file($file);

        # cause the file to be re-read from the source
        $bio->read_file();

DESCRIPTION
This module is designed to recolor images files. I built it because I am regularly producing web sites with many common interface graphics where we just need to change the colors. The name BioChrome comes from the name of the special color changing cells that give a Chameleon its color changing ability.

Also included in the distribution are modules that allow Apache (with mod_perl) to build images on the fly and a Template::Toolkit plugin to allow the creation of images from within a Template.

An instance of a Image::BioChrome should be created for each image file that you want to work on.

my $b = new Image::BioChrome 'test.gif';

In order to then change the colors you need to call one of the color change methods detailed below. There the method requires a color string it will accept the input as either a string of color values or as an array ref to a set of colors.

A color string is simply a series of hexadecimal rgb triples separated by character other than 0-9, a-f or #. For example ff0000_00ff00_0000ff is red followed by green followed by blue.

$b->colors('ff0000_00ff00_0000ff')

or

$b->colors(['ff0000','00ff00','0000ff']);

or

$b->colors('ff0000','00ff00','0000ff');

Now you may be asking yourself what the module does with the color information. The best answer is to look at the documentation in the examples directory. Explaining how colors are processed in ascii art is really difficult.

Once you have passed the relevant color information the file can be written to disk by calling the write file method.

$b->write_file('output.gif');

Currently BioChrome will only recolor GIF files. Any file which it is not capable of being recolored will simply be copied when write_file is called.

Color Change Methods

  alphas
Expects a color string with upto four colors. Every color in the color palette will be changed. The four colors are blended according to the amount of red, green and blue in the image.

  colors
Expects a set of colors upto the number of colors in the color palette. The colors will be replaced with the colors given.

  percents ( red_percent, green_percent, blue_percent )
Changes every color in the palette by adjusting the amount each part of the color by the percentages given.

SEE ALSO
Apache::BioChrome, Template::Plugin::BioChrome

AUTHOR
Simon Matthews <sam@tt2.com>

REVISION
$Revision: 1.16 $

COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2003 Simon Matthews. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software; you can distribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.