Clean up Whiteboard Snaps with the Whiteboard Picture Cleaner Script

Productivity Sauce

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but ImageMagick is a pretty amazing toolset. And my latest GitHub find is yet another proof of that. Whiteboard Picture Cleaner is a nifty ImageMagick one-liner that can transform snapshots of whiteboard doodles and scribbles into cleaned up and legible images. Despite its simplicity, the one-liner is capable of producing rather impressive results. To make this script work on your Linux machine, you only need to install the ImageMagick package. Create then a new text file, and paste the following code into it:

#!/bin/bash
convert "$1" -morphology Convolve DoG:15,100,0 -negate -normalize -blur 0x1 -channel RBG -level 60%,91%,0.1 "$2"

Save the file under the whiteboardcleaner.sh name and make the script executable using the chmod +x whiteboardcleaner.sh command. That's all there is to it. To clean up a snapshot, run the ./whiteboardcleaner.sh original.jpg result.jpg command (replace original.jpg and result.jpg with the actual name of the snapshot file and the desired name of the resulting image).

If you plan to use the script on a regular basis, you might want to add it as a function to the .bashrc file. To do this, open the file for editing and append the following code to it:

function whiteboardcleaner
{
convert "$1" -morphology Convolve DoG:15,100,0 -negate -normalize -blur 0x1 -channel RBG -level 60%,91%,0.1 "$2"
}

Now you can evoke the script from any directory using the whiteboardcleaner original.jpg result.jpg command.