I recently found myself needing to compare bitmap images, to see if they were about the same. The images were from Gnuplot generate graphs, and I wanted to check whether subtle changes in the data had not introduced unexpected changed to the plot. A simple binary diff told me that there were indeed some differences, however, comparing them manually was not possible.

Enter the handy tool perceptualdiff, which lets you compare TIF and PNG images based on a perceptual metric. It actually goes beyond simple bitwise pixel diff, and tries to compare based on a model of the human visual system. Consider the examples below, and it is clear that it is a useful tool. It makes it easy to see where the small differences were introduced. (As it turns out, it is only the result of the two plots being generated on different machines, with different versions of Gnuplot and possibly also different available fonts).

The tool is in the Fedora repository, so a simple yum is enough:
yum install perceptualdiff

To generate an output diff image, this command does the job:
perceptualdiff -output diff.ppm image1.png image2.png