Most developers are familiar with ImageMagick, a very capable open source software suite that they can use to manage and manipulate images.
The functionality of ImageMagick is typically utilized from the command-line, but wrappers have been written for a wide selection of programming languages, making ImageMagick a very popular choice among developers.
Often programmers use ImageMagick for simple operations such as scaling or stretching an image to fit specific dimensions. But as we'll see in this post, there are many advanced techniques available, such as 'masking’, pixel 'blending' and others that enable you to achieve more complex and extremely useful effects.