Compressonator V2.6 release adds HDR tonemapping compression, new image analysis features

We are excited to announce the release of Compressonator V2.6. This version contains several new features and optimizations, including:

• Adaptive Format Conversion for general transcoding operations with optional compression support. This release ships with a 16/32 floating point EXR/DDS HDR to 8-bit BC7 tone mapping transcoder
• Image Difference Analysis Feature generates a visual difference representation and a set of quality metrics (SSIM, PSNR, MSE) for a reference image and its compressed version
• ASTC Optimizations  improved performance for the ASTC codec

Please refer to the sections below for more details on each new feature.

Download and Support

Head over to the Compressonator page for more information about the tool.

You can also access the GitHub source page , release page and wiki page directly.

We want to hear from you! New feature suggestions or ideas for improvement are always welcome, please use the comments section below to leave your feedback.

Thank you for your ongoing support, and we hope that you find this new release of the Compressonator tool useful in your project workflows.

Adaptive Format Conversion (HDR Tonemapping Compression)

This new feature provides the ability to adapt source channel formats for transcoding, with optional compression, into multiple destination codec formats that are not directly compatible with each other. This feature is in early development and currently only supports compression of  Float 16 or Float 32 channel images into any block compressed 8 bits-per-channel format. Users can also decompress or transcode images of 8 bits per channel to HDR formats; currently, for this release, no scaling or special filters are applied during the conversion to Float 16 or Float 32 formats.

Conversion options are provided to process input data as either float (32 bits per channel) or half float (16 bits per channel) values, depending upon the desired quality of the final image. For instance, EXR or DDS float and other half-float types can be compressed and transcoded into a BC7 format (8 bits per channel) .

The Adaptive Format Conversion for HDR to BC7 allows the user to set the desired target compression quality along with a number of parameters for controlling the shape of the curve to use for the tone-mapping operator.

For more information on this feature please refer to the wiki page on Github.

Image Difference Analysis

Image analysis and pixel difference views can now be performed on any two input images of supported formats. This feature can be used to provide a clear visual representation of the quality of a compressed image against an original reference image.

In addition to the generated difference image, various metrics such as SSIM, PSNR and MSE are displayed alongside the image data, providing information on the overall compression quality.

A difference image (center) is generated from the source image (top right) and the compressed version (bottom right). Various metrics quality appear in the panel on the left

For more information on this feature please refer to the wiki page on Github.

ASTC Improvements

This release includes several enhancements to the ASTC support in Compressonator:

1. Vulkan decompression views are now supported
2. General performance optimizations of the software encoder and decoder
3.  The ASTC codec is now GPU compliant, Compute Shaders can now be utilized for hardware accelerated encode and decode