# ImageMagick News

News • Community

ImageMagick best practices strongly encourages you to configure a security policy that suits your local environment.

We are utilizing a new community discussion service. The previous discourse server remains available to read legacy discussions.

We discovered a bug in the pseudo-random generator prior to ImageMagick 7.0.9-11, the first 3 values repeated because the random state was not initialized properly. As a consequence of the fix, expect a different numerical sequence when seeding (-seed).

As an analog to linear (RGB) and non-linear (sRGB) color colorspaces, as of ImageMagick 7.0.7-17, we introduce the LinearGray colorspace. Gray is non-linear grayscale and LinearGray is linear (e.g. -colorspace linear-gray).

Now that ImageMagick version 7 is released, we continue to maintain the legacy release of ImageMagick, version 6, at https://legacy.imagemagick.org. Learn how ImageMagick version 7 differs from previous versions with our porting guide.

The ImageMagick development process ensures a stable API and ABI. Before each ImageMagick release, we perform a comprehensive security assessment that includes memory error, thread data race detection, and continuous fuzzing to detect and prevent security vulnerabilities.

Want more performance from ImageMagick? Try these options:

- add more memory to your system, see the pixel cache;
- add more cores to your system, see threads of execution support;
- reduce lock contention with the tcmalloc memory allocation library;
- push large images to a solid-state drive, see large image support.

If these options are prohibitive, you can reduce the quality of the image results. The default build is Q16 HDRI. If you disable HDRI, you use half the memory and instead of predominately floating point operations, you use the typically more efficient integer operations. The tradeoff is reduced precision and you cannot process out of range pixel values (e.g. negative). If you build the Q8 non-HDRI version of ImageMagick, you again reduce the memory requirements in half-- and once again there is a tradeoff, even less precision and no out of range pixel values. For a Q8 non-HDRI build of ImageMagick, use these `configure` script options: `--with-quantum-depth=8 --disable-hdri`.

## Community

To join the ImageMagick community, try the discussion service. You can review questions or comments (with informed responses) posed by ImageMagick users or ask your own questions. If you want to contribute image processing algorithms, other enhancements, or bug fixes, open an issue.