ImageMagick: Make image background transparent

Over the years, I have come to love the flexibility and power of ImageMagick. I have very few ImageMagick incantations memorized but I know when it can help and there are examples galore. In this TIL, I record the ImageMagick incantation I borrowed from this forum post to make an image have a transparent background for an important purpose.

I have used this approach with a black and white headshot.

✨ The Incantation

convert image.png -fuzz 10% -transparent white tmp0.png
convert tmp0.png -alpha extract tmp1.png
convert tmp2.png \
-define connected-components:mean-color=true \
-define connected-components:area-threshold=30 \
-connected-components 4 \
tmp3.png
convert image.png tmp3.png -alpha off -compose copy_opacity -composite result.png 

🤓 Annotated Incantation

convert image.png -fuzz 10% -transparent white tmp0.png

Here's what went into that command:

Here's the output:

On the image above, we used this command:

convert tmp0.png -alpha extract tmp1.png

...for this result:

We take one more pass at it:

convert tmp1.png \
-define connected-components:mean-color=true \
-define connected-components:area-threshold=30 \
-connected-components 4 \
tmp2.png

That looks like this:

🔮 Finishing Touches!

convert image.png tmp2.png -alpha off -compose copy_opacity -composite result.png

As you may recall, this whole thing started with:

The final result:

🎉