Happy New Year!
A few years back while stationed in Japan I had an opportunity to evaluated a very popular Japanese software for color palette reduction and optimization by the name of OPTPiX iMageStudio. As luck would have it, I have the opportunity to evaluate the latest version recently, so I'm posting a quick review.
OPTPiX iMageStudio is a tool widely recognized and utilized for its color palette optimization capability in the Japanese games development industry for some time. Marketed as a 2D graphics optimization tool, it also features high level color palette and alpha channel management, supports conversion of specialized image and palette formats and comes with compressed texture and map editing tools.
Color reduction, the key feature of iMageStudio 7, is an important part of the 2D graphics production pipeline. While artists work with full color (15-24 bit) source images, the target platforms (e.g. handheld game consoles, handphones…) can often only display fewer colors (4-8 bit). Even if the target platform can display full color images, using lower bit depth index colored images allow faster processing and more storage capacity. For example, for every full color 24-bit image, three 8-bit index colored images can be stored.
The visual quality of the color reduced output from iMageStudio 7 is unquestionably superior to Photoshop in all the test cases evaluated – a complex multi-colored image, a multi-colored gradient, and a typical colored texture map. OPTPiX’s proprietary palette optimization algorithms resulted in minimal color banding and noise, much better than Photoshop’s output.
Color gradient reduced from 24-bit to 256 colors
Top: Photoshop CS, Bottom: iMageStudio
The program requires a USB hardware dongle to operate, which means all the hassles associated with dongles such as a wasted USB slot…etc. There is also a question of how the software can be installed on multiple systems under the dongle security scheme.
The biggest issue for English speaking users would be that the latest version of iMageStudio is available only in Japanese. The English localized version appears to be a few versions behind. Due to the complex and technical nature of the tool, this would be a major obstacle for users who cannot understand the language, even though users can be trained to memorize menu options and buttons sequences.
Pros
· Excellent color reduction functionality
· Platform specific toolsets
Cons
· Needs a dongle key
· Latest version only available in Japanese
