Man page 1 : pnmdepth

pnmdepth - change the maxval in a portable anymap

pnmdepth newmaxval [ pnmfile ]

Reads a portable anymap as input. Scales all the pixel values, and writes out the image with the new maxval. Scaling the colors down to a smaller maxval will result in some loss of information.

Be careful of off-by-one errors when choosing the new maxval. For instance, if you want the color values to be five bits wide, use a maxval of 31, not 32.

One important use of

pnmdepth is to convert a new format 2-byte-per-sample PNM file to the older 1-byte-per-sample format. Before April 2000, essentially all raw (binary) format PNM files had a maxval less than 256 and one byte per sample, and many programs may rely on that. If you specify a newmaxvalless than 256, the resulting file should be readable by any program that worked with PNM files before April 2000.

pnm(5), ppmquant(1), ppmdither(1)

Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 by Jef Poskanzer.