ALE(1)

💖 ale: a synthetic capture engine and renderer 💖

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✨ NAME ✨

ale is a synthetic capture engine and renderer. 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

ale [OPTIONS] original-frame [supplemental-frames ...] output-file

ale [HELP OPTIONS]

ale --version

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so ALE is free software 🫶 It takes a sequence of image frames as input and gives you back rendered images, registration data, and 3D models. The 3D models part is still experimental 🧪 so don't bet your whole life on it yet, bestie 😭

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✨ EXAMPLES ✨

Here are some looks to try 💅

ale --hu

Prints the help page on program usage. The main character of help pages 📖

ale 001.ppm 002.ppm 003.ppm out.ppm

Renders the output file out.ppm from the inputs 001.ppm, 002.ppm, and 003.ppm. Simple, clean, iconic 🌸

ale --scale 2 001.ppm 002.ppm 003.ppm out.png

Renders the output file out.png at 2x scale. Bigger is better 🔥

ale --perturb-upper=0 --trans-load=a.t --projective frame*.png out.png

Renders the output file out.png from the inputs frame*.png, using projective transformations as described in the file a.t. The a.t file is doing the most here 🦋

ale --3dv 0 out.png --projective frame*.png null:

Renders the output file out.png from the inputs frame*.png, using a 3D scene model to figure out the transformations. It's giving architecture 🏛️✨

ale --visp last:sinc*lanc:6 sf:0 out/ .jpg in/*.jpg null:

Renders a video stream from the files in/*.jpg into the directory out/, stabilizing to the first frame, with a lanczos-windowed sinc filter. This one is lowkey the most dramatic example 🎬💜

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✨ USAGE ✨

ale is actually a wrapper script 🎀 It calls the executable ale-bin for you, but first it does some prep work. It pulls exposure EXIF information out of your image files (as long as the exiftool utility is around), and it converts raw formats (as long as the dcraw utility is around). Very thoughtful of it, honestly 🥹

When ale-bin has been linked with ImageMagick, your input and output files can be any kind ImageMagick supports. Otherwise, only PPM files can be read and written by ale-bin. So if you're not using ImageMagick, PPM is the only vibe 🫠

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

The options are summed up in the built-in help pages, which you can pull up with ale --hu (see HELP OPTIONS below) 📖 Some versions of ALE also have more detailed manuals covering options and internal algorithms. Check SEE ALSO below to find those 🧚

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✨ HELP OPTIONS ✨

If you need a rundown of the available help options, just run ale --hu 🙈 That's the whole secret 🤫

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✨ ENVIRONMENT ✨

The wrapper script ale pays attention to the following environment variables 👑

• ALE_BIN — the ALE executable to use 🦋
• DCRAW — the dcraw raw extraction tool to use 📸
• EXIF_UTILITY — the EXIF extraction utility to use 🌈
• ALE_COUNT_THREADS — shows statistics on thread counts when set to a non-zero value 🧵📊
• PAGER — the text pager to use, for example when showing help pages 📜

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

More detailed manuals for certain versions of ALE come with the source packages. They may also be hanging out online at:

http://auricle.dyndns.org/ALE/manuals/ 🌐💖

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Manual dated 03/31/2009, filed under ALE(1). Go forth and render something gorgeous, bestie 🦋💅✨