content: making-background-images
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| author | category | content | published_date | slug | summary | title | url |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ryan | technology | I'm a big fan of [podcasts](http://www.ryancheley.com/podcasts-i-like/). I've been listening to them for 4 or 5 years now. One of my favorite Podcast Networks, [Relay](http://www.relay.fm) just had their second anniversary. They offer memberships and after listening to hours and hours of _All The Great Shows_ I decided that I needed to become a [member](https://www.relay.fm/membership). One of the awesome perks of [Relay](http://www.relay.fm) membership is a set of **Amazing** background images. This is fortuitous as I've been looking for some good backgrounds for my iMac, and so it seemed like a perfect fit. On my iMac I have several `spaces` configured. One for `Writing`, one for `Podcast` and one for everything else. I wanted to take the backgrounds from Relay and have them on the `Writing` space and the `Podcasting` space, but I also wanted to be able to distinguish between them. One thing I could try to do would be to open up an image editor (Like [Photoshop](http://www.photoshop.com), [Pixelmater](http://www.pixelmator.com/pro/) or [Acorn](https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/)) and add text to them one at a time (although I'm sure there is a way to script them) but I decided to see if I could do it using Python. Turns out, I can. This code will take the background images from my `/Users/Ryan/Relay 5K Backgrounds/` directory and spit them out into a subdirectory called `Podcasting` from PIL import Image, ImageStat, ImageFont, ImageDraw from os import listdir from os.path import isfile, join # Declare Text Attributes TextFontSize = 400 TextFontColor = (128,128,128) font = ImageFont.truetype("~/Library/Fonts/Inconsolata.otf", TextFontSize) mypath = '/Users/Ryan/Relay 5K Backgrounds/' onlyfiles = [f for f in listdir(mypath) if isfile(join(mypath, f))] onlyfiles.remove('.DS_Store') rows = len(onlyfiles) for i in range(rows): img = Image.open(mypath+onlyfiles[i]) width, height = img.size draw = ImageDraw.Draw(img) TextXPos = 0.6 * width TextYPos = 0.85 * height draw.text((TextXPos, TextYPos),'Podcasting',TextFontColor,font=font) draw.text img.save('/Users/Ryan/Relay 5K Backgrounds/Podcasting/'+onlyfiles[i]) print('/Users/Ryan/Relay 5K Backgrounds/Podcasting/'+onlyfiles[i]+' successfully saved!') This was great, but it included all of the images, and some of them are _really_ bright. I mean, like _really_ bright. So I decided to use [something I learned while helping my daughter with her Science Project last year](http://www.ryancheley.com/blog/2016/12/17/its- science) and determine the brightness of the images and use only the dark ones. This lead me to update the code to this: from PIL import Image, ImageStat, ImageFont, ImageDraw from os import listdir from os.path import isfile, join def brightness01( im_file ): im = Image.open(im_file).convert('L') stat = ImageStat.Stat(im) return stat.mean[0] # Declare Text Attributes TextFontSize = 400 TextFontColor = (128,128,128) font = ImageFont.truetype("~/Library/Fonts/Inconsolata.otf", TextFontSize) mypath = '/Users/Ryan/Relay 5K Backgrounds/' onlyfiles = [f for f in listdir(mypath) if isfile(join(mypath, f))] onlyfiles.remove('.DS_Store') darkimages = [] rows = len(onlyfiles) for i in range(rows): if brightness01(mypath+onlyfiles[i]) <= 65: darkimages.append(onlyfiles[i]) darkimagesrows = len(darkimages) for i in range(darkimagesrows): img = Image.open(mypath+darkimages[i]) width, height = img.size draw = ImageDraw.Draw(img) TextXPos = 0.6 * width TextYPos = 0.85 * height draw.text((TextXPos, TextYPos),'Podcasting',TextFontColor,font=font) draw.text img.save('/Users/Ryan/Relay 5K Backgrounds/Podcasting/'+darkimages[i]) print('/Users/Ryan/Relay 5K Backgrounds/Podcasting/'+darkimages[i]+' successfully saved!') I also wanted to have backgrounds generated for my **Writing** space, so I tacked on this code: for i in range(darkimagesrows): img = Image.open(mypath+darkimages[i]) width, height = img.size draw = ImageDraw.Draw(img) TextXPos = 0.72 * width TextYPos = 0.85 * height draw.text((TextXPos, TextYPos),'Writing',TextFontColor,font=font) draw.text img.save('/Users/Ryan/Relay 5K Backgrounds/Writing/'+darkimages[i]) print('/Users/Ryan/Relay 5K Backgrounds/Writing/'+darkimages[i]+' successfully saved!') The `print` statements at the end of the `for` loops were so that I could tell that something was actually happening. The images were VERY large (close to 10MB for each one) so the `PIL` library was taking some time to process the data and I was concerned that something had frozen / stopped working This was a pretty straightforward project, but it was pretty fun. It allowed me to go from this:  To this:  For the text attributes I had to play around with them for a while until I found the color, font and font size that I liked and looked good (to me). The Positioning of the text also took a bit of experimentation, but a little trial and error and I was all set. Also, for the `brightness` level of 65 I just looked at the images that seemed to work and found a threshold to use. The actual value may vary depending on the look you're doing for. | 2017-09-17 | making-background-images | I'm a big fan of [podcasts](http://www.ryancheley.com/podcasts-i-like/). I've been listening to them for 4 or 5 years now. One of my favorite Podcast Networks, [Relay](http://www.relay.fm) just had their second anniversary. They offer memberships and after listening to hours and hours of _All The Great Shows_ I decided that I needed to … | Making Background Images | https://www.ryancheley.com/2017/09/17/making-background-images/ |