Squeeze It Good With ImageVice!

by John H. Farr

BoxTop Software's ImageVice 2.0 is a fancy Photoshop color reduction filter (plug-in) that "enables common multimedia format files, such as GIF, PICT, BMP, and PNG to be made up to 70 percent smaller than previously possible."

Quite a claim, but this is not compression software. ImageVice doesn't compress anything by itself, although it changes the image data so that the file becomes easier to compress. Let's just say that it works with any file format that uses "lossless compression," like the aforementioned GIF, PNG, BMP, and PICT formats. After you have massaged the data with ImageVice and saved your image, it will be smaller, often by a considerable margin. Remember, the filter is a versatile color reduction tool but does not not produce any files of its own. Working within Photoshop, it alters the image data of either the entire document or the current selection.

ImageVice applies its proprietary "shape-form shading color mapping techniques" (as opposed to traditional dithering) to perform this color reduction in a way that attempts to preserve the visual quality of the image. ImageVice is said to work especially well with visually complex images like photographs, providing you're going to save them in GIF or PNG format for the Web. JPEGs are another matter entirely, due to their lossy compression format, and BoxTop would like you to use their excellent ProJPEG 3.1.2 product to optimize those particular files.

A considerable portion of the documentation is taken up with discussing this issue, and there are indeed ways that ImageVice can shrink the image data for JPEGs, but here we enter the higher realms of graphics arcana. A discussion of color reduction and compression methods is beyond the scope of this review in any case, so we'll take BoxTop's word for it. Incidentally, the PDF manual contains a couple of lengthy tutorials which provide a good color reduction theory education in themselves. You'll miss an awful lot of things you really need to know to get the most out of the software if you skip the reading, so don't!

Besides having its own proprietary color reduction technology, ImageVice appears to be unique in its ability to select different areas of your image and apply different color reduction settings to each: a simple background could use a more aggressive setting, for example. Just be warned that ImageVice has tools you may not have used before, like the Convergance [sic] and Velocity sliders (one more reason to study the manual).

And now to work: how best to test this thing?

We should mention first that BoxTop also recommends and provides a free application called GIF Prep, which everyone should have anyway. It permanently strips the resource fork data ("Macintosh specific fluff") from any file dropped into it, so be careful! We took a BoxTop-supplied animated logo Photoshop GIF (56K, top of page) sporting a preview image icon, dragged it onto GIF Prep, and quick and a wink we had a 48K file with a generic Photoshop icon. Very good! For our main experiment, we decided to choose something messy, like the strange Photoshop doodle we put together the other night (below). Saved as a Photoshop GIF (but without using ImageVice), it came to 71K. How much smaller a GIF could we make out of it?

By following all the instructions and opting for the best possible image quality with the default ImageVice setting of 128 colors (7-bit) we shrank the file to 64K. Dropping it onto GIF Prep stripped it down to 53K, and yes, this step could have been taken first. We repeated the process with a 6-bit setting, which resulted in an acceptable 55K image (45K after GIF Prep). To proceed beyond this point (and you certainly can) requires extensive manual tweaking, which just happens to be explained at some length in the excellent documentation. For example, since an 8-bit setting gives you up to 256 colors, you can type in smaller color numbers until you arrive at the smallest possible size with the image quality you desire. For many users, the default 7-bit setting (up to 128 colors) will be fine.

	For our next experiment, we took a simple photo-based image of a sheep (from the Iowa State Fair) that we had saved using wwwART 2.0 (a stunningly simple $19.95 image editor from MicroFrontier, Inc. in Des Moines, ironically). The GIF was a tiny 11K to start with.
	Pasting its contents into Photoshop and applying ImageVice with the "Best Quality" settings resulted in a 16K Photoshop GIF that weighed only 7.5K after stripping the resource fork with GIF Prep. The picture quality was very much like the result of our next attempt, in which we lowered the bit depth a couple of notches but still kept the "Best Quality" settings.
	This one was 13.8K before GIF Prep and only 5.5K afterwards! Between these three there are only small differences in image quality, although the original 11K wwwART GIF is still nicest of all (before color reduction was applied). If the slight degradation in image quality isn't that noticeable on your monitor right now, then it was worth the effort: we cut the original GIF size by 50 percent (11K vs. 5.5K)!

This software allows very flexible and minute control of several different color reduction techniques and as such can be a powerful tool for those of you who know what you're doing. In the area of manual tweaking especially, you can accomplish miracles with ImageVice and a little patience. While we had no problems running ImageVice by itself within Photoshop, BoxTop recommends that you use ImageVice in conjunction with its PhotoGIF plug-in for best results, as PhotoGIF can save GIFs directly from RGB mode. (We intend to test these two together at a later date.)

ImageVice 2.0 costs $49.95 and we think it's worth every penny. You can download your own own demo from the BoxTop Web site.

PROS:	Extremely flexible yet easy to use, does the job of reducing file sizes while maintaining good image quality. Valuable documentation has lots of insider tips for color tweaking.
CONS:	Some study required to get the most out of the software, possibly too many steps for graphics newbies. Somewhat slow to render preview image.
CONCLUSION:	A tool for power users! Level of graphics knowledge shown by developers is very high and reflected in ImageVice. If you don't have this in your toolbox, you probably should. A solid 4 out of 5 rating!

John H. Farr, Applelinks' Apple Computer News editor and FARR SITE author, welcomes your comments .

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August 28, 2008