Once I was a toddler, I beloved in search of Waldo within the “The place’s Waldo?” guide collection. Nowadays I am a sucker for TMZ’s “What is the Massive Frigin Distinction” photos, the place TMZ barely adjustments a picture and you must spot the variations between the 2. That acquired me to considering — how simply might I automate diff’ing two photos? This StackOverflow put up was gold.

To create a diff of two comparable photos, we’ll use ImageMagick’s convert command line utility with a big host of configurations:

convert '(' image1.png -flatten -grayscale Rec709Luminance ')' 
        '(' image2.png -flatten -grayscale Rec709Luminance ')' 
        '(' -clone 0-1 -compose darken -composite ')' 
        -channel RGB -combine diff.png

How efficient is that this command with its configuration arguments? Let’s take a look:

Authentic Picture

Modified Picture

Diff’ed Picture

The diff picture result’s fairly informative! The dimensions of the sun shades is clearly offered, and should you look carefully, you’ll be able to see one cranium on the top-right of the shirt has been flipped.

No matter your motive for desirous to establish the distinction two photos, ImageMagick’s convert software is spectacular. You may do 1,000,000 issues with ImageMagick; take a look at my Media tutorials to study extra superior methods to switch photos, movies, and audio!