Imagemagick integration for Drupal

Just a note that I am in the process of composing my project proposal. it's a work in process at the moment,
and i will be updating it throughout the next day, based on various discussions / inputs.

Here's it's "home" for now : http://drupal.pastebin.com/687271

And after the jump is the latest version

Imagemagick integration for Drupal
- [ ] Project Description
    - [ ] Create a general purpose image manipulation module using the
          ImageMagick application 
- [ ] Motivation
    - [ ] Drupal's image subsystem has some very limited capabilities,
          but a more complete library would allow for more distinctive
          sites, and lower the time it takes to maintain these sites.
    - [ ] The module will be developed in such a way, that image
          filters can be distributed and re-used in various sites, and
          improve image handling and image integration for all modules
          that use images, including the user module avatars.
- [ ] Problem Description
    - [ ] Images that are uploaded often need to be manipulated to fit
          in with the general theme of the site. This might include
          such things such as adding borders, cropping images, resizing
          to the correct sizes and perhaps even modifying the colours.
    - [ ] All of the above effects are available when you have the
          imagemagick application available, however the command is not
          widely understood, and apart from a small amount of basic
          functionality, none of the features are available to Drupal
          users and developers.
    - [ ] Image manipulations however can be fairly complex, and most
          of the time do not require a single operation to be executed,
          hence a image manipulation pipeline needs to be developed,
          whereby multiple effects can be applied to each image, or
          each stage of the image.
- [ ] Success Criteria
    - [ ] Develop a mechanism for creating image manipulation workflow.
        - [ ] Each operation must be stackable, building on the
              previous output.
        - [ ] Each individual operation must have a defined set of
              inputs and result in an image.
        - [ ] Helper operations must exist which can save intermediate
              phases.
        - [ ]
    - [ ] Interface
        - [ ] The functionality must be captured in 3 basic entities
            - [ ] Operations
                - [ ] Each image operation which consists of one step,
                      which 
    - [ ] Operations (to be extended)
        - [ ] Layer compositions.
            - [ ] Must be able to combine two or more layers into a
                  single image.
            - [ ] All compositions must (be able to?) maintain the
                  translucency of all layers.
            - [ ] Student must decide on which layer composition modes
                  to support (hue, saturation etc)
        - [ ] Gradients
            - [ ] Must be able to generate gradients through the use of
                  parameters.
                - [ ] Possibly provide an ajax mechanism for seleting
                      gradient parameters.
- [ ] Roadmap