15-Minute Reviews :: Image Compressor 2008 Pro v6.0.2.5

Welcome to today’s 15-Minute Review! Today’s review is on Image Compressor 2008 version 6.0.2.5 by MasRizal & Partners – An application to aid in better compression of various image formats.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“The New Image Compressor 2008 is a perfect choice for digital photography enthusiasts. It’s armed with complete image viewer, screen capture, photo retouch and of course image compression tools.

Unlike any other image processing software, Image Compressor analyze each pixels and automatically adjust compression level to maintain picture quality. The result is a JPEG file with a very good image quality and smallest file size possible. As easy as zipping your files!”

Quick Pros

• Quick-start guide provides some helpful information
• Lots of features such as retouching and compression
• Capability to use Photoshop filters
• EXIF editor for adding image details during archival
• Compressor functionality powerful including watermarking

Quick Cons

• Interface overall could be improved functionally
• Image retouching is a bit tedious through menu
• Undo keyboard shortcut seems temperamental
• Compression is slow and can only compress to JPG
• Add: Application hijacks file associations

Expansion

Upon the first launch of this application, you are greeted by the quick-start guide which provides you some ideas of what is available with this application and how to use them. It is well laid out (Except the next/previous buttons are not easy to see) and does show a good deal of information. When you pass the quick-start guide, you are greeted by the main window – Here you will be doing most of your tasks. Along the top is a series of buttons and controls, including what mode you’re on (Image Viewer, Image Compare, Image Retouch and Image Tray) and controls for the mode you are currently in. The center of the main window is where the current mode is in, which generally consists of an image (or series of images) and a few informational boxes to the right of the image(s). Below this, you will find the image selector box where you can thumbnail-browse for which images you wish to handle. There is almost always an army of Rick-Click contextual menus as well wherever you go, which is definitely handy. While everything is generally relatively easy to find, in almost all instances you have to resort to the menu (Especially with the image retouching – A fairly large downfall) or hunting for what you want to do; There isn’t a lot of intuitiveness in a lot of cases here.

Besides the compression functionality, there is a lot of other functions in this application which can be helpful to the digital professional. There is a series of image retouching functions, including the ability to run Photoshop plug-ins directly from the application (Could not test at this time however) and a good series of color correction functions as well. The image compare function is really good for if you are wanting a serious side-by-side comparison of either resulting files from compression or even multiple shots (for example a portrait session) to see which will be the chosen one. There is also batch mode (The Image Tray) where you can batch compress your images (Which in batch mode also has the capability to resize, rotate, watermark and basic effects), as well as create a large variety of image-package setups including web galleries, animated GIFs, PDFs and zip archive to name a few. There are also a lot of other little gems running around this application, but the most notable (Considering the name of the application) is the image compression.

The compression function is actually quite decent. The results were quite surprising indeed. While there is the capability to restrict the file to a specific file size, the results from just choosing the compression method is enough to make everyone happy. While the application states that “No matter which method you choose, Image Compressor will recompress your image file with very minimum quality loss you may not notice,” the truth is that if you do run on the Extreme Compression mode, unless the image is very noisy, you will notice. However, if you tone down the settings to Aggressive, you will see your image come back, while still saving a significant space. Using the BladedThoth logo (Which has hard lines and definitive colors), I created a demo file which can be viewed through the link below.

Click here to see the demo file

As you may note by the demo, included (from left to right) is the original image, the image compressed down to smallest size in Photoshop (Which is still significantly larger than the largest Image Compressor file), the image on Extreme compression and the image on Aggressive compression. As you’ll see, even the Aggressive compression size is still smaller than the highest compression, yet looks worlds better. If you look at the Extreme compression one you will see the colors are a little distorted in places; There are artifacts in the solid colors, and the edges just look blurry overall. Aggressive seems to deal away with these issues nicely. While there is still a visible difference between the original and the Aggressive setting, it is not bad at all; Ultimately, it will take some playing to find the settings you like in which situation. The resulting image files were tested on different internet browsers as well as printed, and there does not seem to be any glitches either loading the images in from other sources (Which I have seen in other image compressors – Improper file formats causing issues with some display engines.) The biggest downfall I feel is that you can only saves to JPEG format for compression.

Sample

If you missed the sample above, here it is again

Final Verdict

While this application definitely would not replace any decent batch correction tools or Photoshop for sheer power, the compression functionality alone is very impressive. The uses are limitless, but I feel those who would benefit the most from this tool are actually web developers who are bandwidth-conscientious. For free, this application may make sense for anyone looking for good image compression. As for paying $99.95 ($89.95 according to the site with a ‘timer’ to instill a sense of ‘urgency’) for this application, I do not know if it is worth it – You are paying for the other tools which need to be improved; This one really boils down to how much your file size is worth to you (And in the terms of bandwidth, it may). There is an alternative however; For $49.95 ($44.95, with the same timer as pro), you can get the Home edition, which according to the website is only lacking the internet image grabber, EXIF editor, Photoshop plug-in engine and some of the export engines (animated GIF, PDF, etc.)

Update

Thanks to the people at GaotD (#1 ZA, #12 Vilulf, Etc – As well as #63 Q for pointing it out to me), this application hijacks all file associations for images without permission. For many artists, this is a big headache and will end up with a lot of people frustrated with this until you can get your file associations back to the proper application. This really needs to be fixed – Not just with the preferences, but during install or first run.

Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, March 03, 2008