Convert an Image to Grayscale with ImageMagick

By  on  
Grayscale Logo

A few years ago I bought a DSLR camera with a bunch of filter effects built in and it's been worth every penny.  I took some incredible photos in London, Paris, and Jamaica, and tooks some really special photos of my son during his first few years.  And many of my favorite photos were taken with grayscale filter but some I took in color and badly wanted them in grayscale.  Of course I can use Photoshop to convert the image to grayscale but that's too much work.  I have ImageMagick -- why not use the shell to very quickly convert it to grayscale?

Converting the image to grayscale with ImageMagick is simple:

convert my-image.jpg -colorspace Gray my-image-gray.jpg

The command is self-explanatory and executes in milliseconds.  And since Photoshop takes a few seconds to start and I have to do the work manually, ImageMagick makes everything so much easier.

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Using MooTools For Opacity

    Although it's possible to achieve opacity using CSS, the hacks involved aren't pretty. If you're using the MooTools JavaScript library, opacity is as easy as using an element's "set" method. The following MooTools snippet takes every image with the "opacity" class and sets...

  • By
    Image Manipulation with PHP and the GD Library

    Yeah, I'm a Photoshop wizard. I rock the selection tool. I crop like a farmer. I dominate the bucket tool. Hell, I even went as far as wielding the wizard wand selection tool once. ...OK I'm rubbish when it comes to Photoshop.

Discussion

  1. MaxArt

    How about sepia tones? After all, it’s just like converting to grayscale with a different balance of red, green and blue.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!