An approach to designing multidimensional linear-phase FIR diamond subband filters having the perfect reconstruction property is presented. It is based on a transformation of variables technique and is equivalent to the generalized McClellan transformation. Methods for designing a whole class of transformation are given. The approach consists of two parts; design of the transformation and design of the 1-D filters. The use of Lagrange halfband filters to design the 1-D filters is discussed. The modification of a particular Lagrange halfband filter which gives a pair of simple 1-D filters that are almost similar to each other in their frequency characteristics but still form a perfect reconstruction pair is presented. The design technique is extended to other types of two-channel sampling lattice and subband shapes, in particular, the parallelogram and the diagonally quadrant subband cases. Several numerical design examples are presented to illustrate the flexibility of the design method.