title: Imagemagick or similar for scripted image enhancement
body: <p>I found the <a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CleaningUpWhiteboardPictures" rel="nofollow noreferrer">following algorithm</a> to work fairly well for enhancement of various images of whiteboards, etc:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>duplicate the layer, make sure the top layer is active</li>
  <li>(gaussian)blur the new layer. You shouldn't be able to read the text anymore. </li>
  <li>set the layer mode to dodge</li>
  <li>invert the layer</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I tried it out in gimp and it looks promising. I'd like to try it en-masse for a large number of images and make it available as a command line tool.</p>
  
  <p>I realize I can script gimp, but that feels too heavy for this purpose. <a href="http://www.imagemagick.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Imagemagick</a> seems ideal for this, but I don't know if I can do the layering with it.</p>
  
  <p>So the question is:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Is there a way to script imagemagick to do the above algorithm without the use of a temporary file? </li>
  <li>Is there a reasonable alternative library/tool that can be integrated with Python?</li>
  </ul>