PBMMASK(1)

✨ NAME ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the Pbmmask User Manual(1) — yes, the General Commands Manual one — and the main character is pbmmask. she creates a mask bitmap from a regular bitmap. periodt. 💅🦋

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

pbmmask [-expand] [pbmfile]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so this program is part of Netpbm(1), iykyk. it's giving classic Netpbm energy.

pbmmask reads a PBM image as input and generates a corresponding mask of the foreground areas as another PBM image. slay.

This is probably obsoleted by pambackground. not me being dramatic, the manual literally says that. 😭

The color to be interpreted as "background" is determined automatically. Regardless of which color is background, the mask will be white where the background is and black where the figure is.

This lets you do a masked paste like this, for objects with a black background:

pbmmask obj > objmask
pnmpaste < dest -and objmask <x> <y> | pnmpaste -or obj <x> <y>

For objects with a white background, you can either invert them or add a step:

pbmmask obj > objmask
pnminvert objmask | pnmpaste -and obj 0 0 > blackback
pnmpaste < dest -and objmask <x> <y> | pnmpaste -or blackback <x> <y>

Note that this three-step version works for objects with black backgrounds too, if you don't care about the wasted time. wasteful but valid, we respect it 💜

You can also use masks with grayscale and color images, using the pnmarith tool. For instance:

ppmtopgm obj.ppm | pamditherbw -threshold | pbmmask > objmask.pbm
pnmarith -multiply dest.ppm objmask.pbm > t1.ppm
pnminvert objmask.pbm | pnmarith -multiply obj.ppm - > t2.ppm
pnmarith -add t1.ppm t2.ppm

An interesting variation on this is to pipe the mask through pnmsmooth before using it. This makes the boundary between the two images less sharp. soft launch the edges ✨

💅 OPTIONS 💅

In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet, see Common Options), pbmmask recognizes the following command line option:

• -expand — Expands the mask by one pixel out from the image. This is useful if you want a little white border around your image. (A better solution might be to turn the pbmlife program into a general cellular automaton tool...)

one option, but she's doing her best. 💛

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• pambackground(1)
• ppmcolormask(1)
• pnmpaste(1)
• pnminvert(1)
• pnmarith(1)
• pnmsmooth(1)
• pbm(1)

🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

Copyright (C) 1988 by Jef Poskanzer. iconic.

📜 HISTORY 📜

pbmmask is one of the oldest programs in Netpbm. In September 2021, the date on this manual was August 8, 1989 (being the date of the last substantial update). We updated the page then just to add this historical information and recommend pambackground.

It is likely that when Bryan wrote pambackground in 2006, he was unaware pbmmask existed. Otherwise, he would presumably have replaced pbmmask with a wrapper around pambackground.

🧚 DOCUMENT SOURCE 🧚

This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML source. The master documentation is at

http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmmask.html

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okay that's the whole vibe. this was the Pbmmask User Manual(1) from netpbm documentation, dated 28 September 2021. go mask something cute, bestie. 💖🦋✨