PIXSATURATE(1)

💅 PIXSATURATE(1) — the pix-saturation glow-up

okay bestie, welcome to pixsaturate, one of the little utilities from the BRL-CAD manual fam. it's a tiny little icon that does exactly one thing and does it gorgeously: it turns the colour dial up or down on a pix image 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

pixsaturate — adjust the color saturation of a pix file 🌈

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

pixsaturate [-h | -?] _saturation_ < infile.pix > outfile.pix

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so here's the tea: pixsaturate reads a color pix(5) image from standard input, adjusts its color saturation by whatever saturation factor you hand it, and writes the result straight out to standard output. that's the whole vibe ✨

for each pixel, the luminance gets computed using fixed perceptual weights — literally R=79, G=156, B=21 out of 256, no negotiating — and then the chroma is scaled toward or away from that gray value. it's giving "respect the eye's opinions" 💅

the saturation argument has to be a non-negative number. the lore goes:

• 0.0 → monochrome (grayscale) image, full desaturated queen 🩶
• 1.0 → image is left completely unchanged, no notes
• greater than 1.0 → colors get more intense, turned all the way up 🔥

output samples are clamped to the 0..255 range, so no runaway values, we stay in our lane 🫶

⚠️ okay important: both standard input and standard output have to be pipes or redirected files. pixsaturate flat-out refuses to run if either one is connected to a terminal. it's not shy, it just won't do it 😭

🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

• -h, -? — print a usage message and exit. these are the only flags accepted, periodt. anything else that starts with - gets rejected 💀

🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

Example 1. Desaturate a rendered image to grayscale

pixsaturate 0.0 < scene.pix > scene-gray.pix

this produces a monochrome version of an image rendered by rt(1), preserving the perceptual luminance — so it still reads right, it's just in grayscale. perfect as a matte or for printing 🖨️✨

Example 2. Boost color and convert to a viewable PNG

pixsaturate 1.5 < render.pix | pix-png -w 1024 -n 768 > render.png

this bumps the color intensity of a 1024x768 pix(5) image by 50% and pipes it through pix-png(1) so you get a way more vivid PNG for previewing. main character energy output fr fr 🔥👑

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

brlcad(1), pix-png(1), pixfade(1), rt(1), pix(5)

💜 AUTHOR 💜

BRL-CAD Team 🫶

⭐ COPYRIGHT ⭐

This software is Copyright (c) 1991-2026 by the United States Government as represented by U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

🐛 BUG REPORTS 🐛

Reports of bugs or problems should be submitted via electronic mail to devs@brlcad.org 📧

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okay that's the whole page bestie!! this one's from the BRL-CAD collection — the source and version line at the bottom just tags it as BRL-CAD with PIXSATURATE(1) on the right, so consider this the cute sign-off: BRL-CAD, PIXSATURATE(1), slay 💅💖