I need to generate jpg images from PDF files (first page only). The PDF files are user generated, so they can contain anything. I'm currently using the following code:
// Load PDF.
$i = new Imagick;
// Create thumbnail of first page of PDF.
$i->setResolution(150, 150);
$i->loadImage("test.pdf[0]");
$i->thumbnailImage(640, 480, true);
// Remove transparency, fill transparent areas with white rather than black.
$i->setImageBackgroundColor("white");
$i->setImageAlphaChannel(11); // Imagick::ALPHACHANNEL_REMOVE
$i->mergeImageLayers(Imagick::LAYERMETHOD_FLATTEN);
// Output.
$i->writeImage("test.jpg");
This works as expected in that transparency becomes white instead of black. However, I've run into problems with some generated jpg images, so I ran jpeginfo on them:
$ jpeginfo -c test.jpg
test.jpg 960 x 480 32bit JFIF N 9481 Unsupported color conversion request [ERROR]
It turns out that some source PDFs actually use CMYK, and apparently are not converted to RGB when saved as jpg. So I changed my code to the following (addition of a single line) to explicitly convert to RGB:
// Load PDF.
$i = new Imagick;
// Create thumbnail of first page of PDF.
$i->setResolution(150, 150);
$i->loadImage("test.pdf[0]");
$i->thumbnailImage(640, 480, true);
// Remove transparency, fill transparent areas with white rather than black.
$i->setImageBackgroundColor("white");
$i->setImageAlphaChannel(11); // Imagick::ALPHACHANNEL_REMOVE
$i->mergeImageLayers(Imagick::LAYERMETHOD_FLATTEN);
// Convert to RGB to prevent creating a jpg with CMYK colors.
$i->setImageColorspace(Imagick::COLORSPACE_RGB);
// Output.
$i->writeImage("test.jpg");
This creates a jpeg with an RGB color profile, all right. However, for some obscure reason it results in an image with a black background again. In other words: the transparency problem is back. Why does Imagick do this, and more importantly, what's the solution to both the transparency problem and the CMYK problem?
