Pbmreduce User Manual(0) Pbmreduce User Manual(0)

pbmreduce - read a PBM image and reduce it N times

pbmreduce [-floyd|-fs|-threshold] [-value val] N [pbmfile]

You can abbreviate any option to its shortest unique prefix.

This program is part of Netpbm(1)

pbmreduce reads a PBM image as input and reduces it by a factor of N, producing a PBM image as output.

pbmreduce duplicates a lot of the functionality of pamditherbw; you could do something like pamscale | pamditherbw, but pbmreduce is a lot faster.

You can use pbmreduce to 're-halftone' an image. Let's say you have a scanner that only produces black&white, not grayscale, and it does a terrible job of halftoning (most b&w scanners fit this description). One way to fix the halftoning is to scan at the highest possible resolution, say 300 dpi, and then reduce by a factor of three or so using pbmreduce. You can even correct the brightness of an image, by using the -value option.

By default, pbmreduce does the halftoning after the reduction via boustrophedonic Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion; however, you can use the -threshold option to specify simple thresholding. This gives better results when reducing line drawings.

The -value option alters the thresholding value for all quantizations. It should be a real number between 0 and 1. Above 0.5 means darker images; below 0.5 means lighter.

pamenlarge(1) , pamscale(1) , pamditherbw(1) , pbm(5)

Copyright (C) 1988 by Jef Poskanzer.

02 August 1989 netpbm documentation