Announcing ImageMagick 5.4.5

The ImageMagick Studio LLC development group announces the release of
ImageMagick 5.4.5.  Version 5.4.5 is a feature release but also resolves
bugs reported against 5.4.4.

ImageMagick is a robust collection of tools and libraries to read, write,
and manipulate an image in many image formats (over 72 major formats)
including popular formats like FlashPIX, GIF, JPEG, PDF, PNG, Photo CD,
SVG, TIFF, and WMF.  With ImageMagick you can create images dynamically,
making it suitable for Web applications.  You can also resize, rotate,
sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image and save your
completed work in the same or differing image format.  Image processing
operations are available from the command line, as well as through C,
C++, and PERL-based programming interfaces.

ImageMagick is copyrighted by ImageMagick Studio, a nonprofit organization
dedicated to making software imaging solutions freely available.
ImageMagick is available for free, may be used to support both open and
proprietary applications, and may be redistributed without fee.

Significant changes from the 5.4.2 release (see release ChangeLog
for details):

  o General:

    - Initial IMDisplay GUI released for Microsoft Windows. Included in
      VisualMagick build.

    - WMF renderer inlines composite images in MVG output so that
      generated MVG files are completely stand-alone.

    - CCIS-601 4:2:2 YUV and CCIS-601 4:2:2 MPEG-2 format support added.

    - See ImageMagick-5.4.5/ChangeLog for additional changes.

  o Utilities enhancements/changes:

    - Mogrify/convert '-transform' option added to apply affine transforms
      to an image.

  o C API enhancements:

    - New "draw.h" API works, and is used by Magick++ and the WMF
      renderer.

    - Error reporting improved when performing color lookups.

    - Affine transformation support added for compositing images (see
      AffineTransformImage()).

  o C++ API enhancements:

    - Drawable classes re-written to use ImageMagick draw.h API
      implementation.

    - Pixels::getConst() method added to access read-only pixels.

    - Blob class extended to support encoding and decoding Base64 data.

    - Image::ping method added to "ping" (obtain dimensions, etc.) a Blob.

    - Composite images are now inlined in MVG so that MVG files are
      completely stand-alone.

    - See ImageMagick-5.4.5/Magick++/NEWS and
      ImageMagick-5.4.5/Magick++/ChangeLog for additional changes.

The ImageMagick WWW page is

  http://www.imagemagick.org/
 
ImageMagick 5.4.5 is available via ftp as

  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-5.4.5.tar.gz

If ftp.imagemagick.org is overloaded, check the list of mirrors at
http://www.imagemagick.org/www/archives.html for other mirrors.

ImageMagick is developed by the members of the ImageMagick Studio
team:

John Cristy           - Principal designer and author.
Bob Friesenhahn       - Magick++, Unix modules, magic, configure, CVS,
                        tests, bug tracking, and WMF.
William Radcliffe     - VisualMagick, FlashPix, TIFF, timers, watermarking,
                        Windows modules, and fast polygon renderer.
Glenn Randers-Pehrson - PNG, MNG, test scripts, documentation enhancements.
Leonard Rosenthol     - Mac support, XCF, PSD, conjure, drawing enhancements.

We would like to give special thanks to several people who assist with
ImageMagick:

Alexander Zimmermann  - Linux binary distributions.
Jaroslav Fojtik       - CUT, ART, and MATLAB coder modules.

There are many other individual contributors, some of whom made
significant contributions to ImageMagick but shall remain anonymous
anyway.