Do you use the tool “convert” to manipulate plots and images? It’s simple, powerful and downright great! Quick examples:
Modify a plot for presentation use, by swapping to a black background with white lines, so it’s easier to read on a screen:
> convert -negate frompaper.ps forscreen.jpg
Make a thumbnail:
> convert -geometry 50×50 big.jpg thumbnail.gif
Blur an image w a Gaussian (for easier Journal Club reading of little datapoints):
>convert -gaussian 2×2 hard2read.ps easy2read.gif
Other tools can do all these tasks, of course. The advantage of Convert is that it’s very simple, fast to type, and scriptable. Convert is part of the open-source ImageMagick package, which is easy to install in linux or OS X. Quick, what are some other astronomy-relevant uses of Convert?
To please my bosses, I have to provide a little higher resolution for some graphics than convert will give you. For making a high-quality png file to dump into a presentation, I use pstopnm and pnmtopng (which are part of the netpbm library. These lines will make a decent output from .eps files from IDL (for instance). The netpbm routines have a lot of functionality if you have the time to learn and play with them,
> pstopnm -portrait -dpi=600 fig.eps
> pnmtopnm fig.eps001.ppm > fig.pnm