Program uses ImageMagick for test PSNR of result images.

How does it work?
The Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a format for storing compressed raster graphics. The compression engine is based on the Deflate method. Unlike other lossless compression schemes, PNG compression does not depend solely on the statistics of the input, but it may vary within wide limits, depending on the compressor’s implementation. A good PNG encoder must be able to take informed decisions about the factors that affect the size of the output. The purpose of this article is to provide information about these factors, and to give advice on implementing efficient PNG encoders.

The PNG compression works in a pipeline manner.
In the first stage, the image pixels are passed through a lossless arithmetic transformation named delta filtering, or simply filtering, and sent further as a (filtered) byte sequence. Filtering does not compress or otherwise reduce the size of the data, but it makes the data more compressible.

In the second stage, the filtered byte sequence is passed through the Ziv-Lempel algorithm (LZ77), producing LZ77 codes that are further compressed by the Huffman algorithm in the third and final stage. The combination of the last two stages is referred to as the Deflate compression, a widely-used, patent-free algorithm for universal, lossless data compression. The maximum size of the LZ77 sliding window in Deflate is 32768 bytes, and the LZ77 matches can be between 3 and 258 bytes long.

The good encoders are at least applying the filtering heuristics.

Use programs:
ECT (Efficient Compression Tool) – https://github.com/fhanau/Efficient-Compression-Tool
Pingo – https://css-ig.net/
PNGWolfZopfli – https://github.com/jibsen/pngwolf-zopfli
OptiPNG – http://optipng.sourceforge.net
TruePNG – http://x128.ho.ua/pngutils.html
AdvanceCOMP – http://www.advancemame.it
Oxipng – https://github.com/shssoichiro/oxipng
Zopfli – https://github.com/google/zopfli
Zopflipng bin – https://github.com/imagemin/zopflipng-bin
PNGOUT – http://advsys.net/ken
DeflOpt – http://www.walbeehm.com/download
Defluff – http://j-o.users.sourceforge.net/
ImageMagick – https://imagemagick.org

Zopfli Compression Algorithm is a compression library programmed in C to perform very good, but slow, deflate or zlib compression. Zopfli Compression Algorithm was created by Lode Vandevenne and Jyrki Alakuijala, based on an algorithm by Jyrki Alakuijala.

There are a number of factors that affect the size of PNG image files, such as the number of colors in the image and whether the image data is stored as RGBA data or in the form of references to a color palette. The main factor is the quality of the Deflate compression used to compress the image data, which is in turn affected by the quality of the compressor and how well the data to be compressed is arranged.

The PNG format supports a number of scanline filters that transform the image data by relating nearby pixels mathematically. Choosing the right filters for each scanline can make the image data more compressible. It is, however, infeasible for non-trivial images to find the best filters so typical encoders rely on a couple of heuristics to find good filters.

PNGWolf employs a genetic algorithm to find better filter combinations than traditional heuristics. It derives a couple of filter combinations heuristically, adds a couple of random combinations, and then looks how well each combination compresses. Two very different combinations may compress similarily well, for instance, one combination may be very good for the first couple of scanlines, while the other may be very good for the last couple of scanlines. So taking the beginning of one combination and the tail of the other to make a new one may result in a combination that compresses better then the original two.

Run only 1 active instance of the program!

Current file has its own status in the list: «running», «done» and «saved space».
Full stats:
1. Number of optimized files (total and current session).
2. Files in the queue (quantity).
3. Saved disk space (Mb) total and for each file in the list.
(You need to save files «res\size.txt» and «res\numbers.txt» before updating, if you want to save the overall statistics («Total»)).

Please send any bugs and requests to maxcompress@ya.ru whith subject “Ultra7z PNG Lossless Optimizer”

It’ free for commercial and non-commercial use!

If you like my program and you want help improve it, you can help me (donate) here.

Icon made by prettycons from Flaticon:
https://www.flaticon.com/authors/prettycons

History:
2024-06-29
Ultra7z PNG Lossless Optimizer 1.08
– Update ECT 0.9.5, Oxipng 9.1.1, OptiPng 0.7.8, Pingo 1.23.8, AdvanceComp 2.6, ImageMagick 7.1.1-34
– Fixed some bugs.

2023-09-03
1.07
– Improved compression:
— new methods for testing variants (filters: fast/good/best).
— added new program: PNGOUT.
– Default multithreading for ECT/OxiPNG (much faster on modern CPU).
– Update ECT 0.9.4, Oxipng 8.0, Pingo 1.11, AdvanceComp 2.5, ImageMagick.
– Fixed some bugs.

2021-07-25
1.06
– Improved compression:
— added new modes: “Extreme” and “Extreme+”.
— added new programs: Pingo, Oxipng, Zopflipng, Defluff.
– Improved compression for ECT:
— added options: “-allfilters”, “-allfilters-b” and “ECT extreme mode (slow)”.
– Added option “Interlaced”.
– Added option “Enable strict losslessness”.
– Added option “Test identity of the result (PSNR)” (by ImageMagick).
– Added option “Number of threads for ECT and OxiPNG (1-16)”.
– Added time for each file from the list.
– Added “Wait” on the button “Start” after click on it.

2020-06-29
1.01
– first release

Download Ultra7z PNG Lossless Optimizer 1.08 (25 Mb):
Download here (25 mb)
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Features of Ultra7z Images to AVIF Smart Converter:
– High compression ratio.
– Supported formats: jpg, jpeg, webp, png, tiff, tif, gif, bmp, pnm, avif, heif, heic, flif.
– Option “Strip metadata (exif etc)”.
– You can set «Run in background (without console output)» or uncheck it for manual process control.
– Option for lossy compression.
– Option for lossless compression.
– Option for smart level of compression (based on SSIM)(very slow, but effective): “Same as JPEG 85%”, “Same as WEBP 85%”, “Target SSIM = 0.97” (you can change values).

AVIF – a modern image format based on the AV1 video format, ROYALTY-FREE, interoperable and open. AVIF is a combination of the HEIF ISO standard, and a royalty-free AV1 codec by Mozilla, Xiph, Google, Cisco, and many others.

AV1 Image File Format supports High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wide Color Gamut (WCG) images as well as Standard Dynamic Range (SDR). It supports monochrome images as well as multi-channel images with all the bit depths and color spaces specified in AV1. Also supports multi-layer images to be stored both in image items and image sequences.

It competes with HEIC which uses the same container format, build upon ISOBMFF, but HEVC for compression. Version 1.0 of the AVIF specification was finalized in February 2019.

It compresses images significantly better than older-generation formats such as WebP and JPEG. It’s supported in Chrome desktop today, and support is coming to other Chromium-based browsers, as well as Firefox. More than a half of an average website’s bandwidth is spent on images. Improved image compression can save bandwidth and improve overall performance of the web.

AVIF features:
– High dynamic range.
– 8, 10, 12 bit color depth.
– Lossless compression and lossy compression.
– Monochrome (alpha/depth) or multi-components.
– Any color-space including: wide color gamut, ISO/IEC CICP and ICC profiles.
– 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4 chroma subsampling.
– Film grain.

AVIF is natively supported in Google Chrome and by many other tools and software libraries. Developers have also added support to a variety of image editing tools.

On 14 December 2018 Netflix published the first .avif sample images, and support was added in VLC. Microsoft announced support with the Windows 10 “19H1” preview release, including support in File Explorer, Paint and multiple APIs, together with sample images. Paint.net added support for opening AVIF files in September 2019 and the ability to save AVIF format images in an August 2020 update. GIMP plugin implementation has been developed supporting both 3.x and 2.10.x plugin APIs. Native AVIF import and export was added to GIMP in October 2020.

In August 2020, Google Chrome version 85 was released with full AVIF support. Mozilla is working on support for the image format in Firefox. Cloudflare announced AVIF support in a blog post on 3 October 2020.

One of the big things AVIF does is it fixes WebP’s biggest flaws. WebP is over 10 years old, and AVIF is a major upgrade over the WebP format. These two formats are technically related: they’re both based on a video codec from the VPx family. WebP uses the old VP8 version, while AVIF is based on AV1, which is the next generation after VP10.

WebP is limited to 8-bit color depth, and in its best-compressing mode of operation, it can only store color at half of the image’s resolution (known as chroma subsampling). This causes edges of saturated colors to be smudged or pixelated in WebP. AVIF supports 10- and 12-bit color at full resolution, and high dynamic range (HDR).

Run only 1 active instance of the program!

Current file has its own status in the list: «running», «done» and «saved space».
Full stats:
1. Number of optimized files (total and current session).
2. Files in the queue (quantity).
3. Saved disk space (Mb) total and for each file in the list.
(You need to save files «res\size.txt» and «res\numbers.txt» before updating, if you want to save the overall statistics («Total»)).

You can specify the path to the file «avifenc.exe» manually in a separate form.

More info about AVIF here

Program uses ImageMagick for pre-convert of input files and for SSIM calculation.

Please send any bugs and requests to maxcompress@ya.ru whith subject “Ultra7z Images/Photos to AVIF Converter”

It’ free for commercial and non-commercial use!

If you like my program and you want help improve it, you can help me (donate) here.

Icon made by Freepik from Flaticon.com
https://www.flaticon.com/authors/freepik

History:
2024-03-09
Ultra7z Images to AVIF Smart Converter 1.05
– Updated AVIF 1.0.4, CAVIF 1.5.5, ImageMagick 7.1.1-26, ExifTool 12.78.
– Added new file extensions for HEIF/AVIF (HEIFS, HEICS, AVCI, AVCS, AVIFS).
– Threads up to 64.

2021-10-03 – 1.04
– Updated AVIF 0.9.2, added CAVIF 1.3.1.
– Option “Convert to PNG/JPG” with metadata (exif etc).
– YUV auto mode.
– Support JXL (JPEG XL), JPE, PPM as input.
– Option “Encode using RGB instead of YCbCr color space”. Makes colors closer to lossless, but makes files larger.
– Threads up to 16.
– Added time for each images from the list.
– Added “Wait…” on the button “Start” after click on it.

2020-12-12 – 1.03
– added smart level of comression (based on SSIM)(very slow, but effective):
“Same as JPEG 85%”, “Same as WEBP 85%”, “Target SSIM = 0.97” (you can change values)

2020-12-01 – 1.01
– first release

Download Ultra7z Images to AVIF Smart Converter 1.05 (29 Mb):
Download here (28 Mb)
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Features:
– Reduce the size of PDF files.
– Full compatible with original PDF format.
– Supported formats: PDF.
– You can set «Run in background (without console output)» or uncheck it for manual process control.

Image resolution (for lossy mode):
– screen (low resolution);
– ebook (medium resolution);
– printer (print optimized);
– prepress (prepress optimized).

DPI from 50 to 600.

Programs:
Cpdfsqueeze (Copyright Coherent Graphics Ltd) – https://www.coherentpdf.com
Pdfsizeopt – https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt
Ghostscript – https://www.ghostscript.com

Cpdfsqueeze is a lossless compressor for PDF files, which works by rearranging and coalescing content within the file. Very fast!

Pdfsizeopt is a program for converting large PDF files to small ones. If the input PDF has many images or large images, pdfsizeopt can be very slow. Pdfsizeopt can use the following external tools to make images in embedded PDF files smaller: sam2p, jbig2, pngout.

Ghostscript is an interpreter for the PostScript language and PDF files. It has been under active development for over 30 years and has been ported to several different systems during this time. Ghostscript consists of a PostScript interpreter layer and a graphics library.

Run only 1 active instance of the program!

Current file has its own status in the list: «running», «done» and «saved space».
Full stats:
1. Number of optimized files (total and current session).
2. Files in the queue (quantity).
3. Saved disk space (Mb) total and for each file in the list.
(You need to save files «res\size.txt» and «res\numbers.txt» before updating, if you want to save the overall statistics («Total»)).

You can specify the path to the file «cpdfsqueeze.exe» manually in a separate form.

Please send any bugs and requests to maxcompress@ya.ru whith subject “Ultra7z PDF Lossless Optimizer”

It’ free for commercial and non-commercial use!

If you like my program and you want help improve it, you can help me (donate) here.

Icon made by Freepik from Flaticon.com
https://www.flaticon.com/authors/freepik

History:
2021-09-19 – 1.01
– first release.

Download Ultra7z PDF Lossless Optimizer & Compressor 1.01 (English) (38 Mb):
Download here (38 Mb)
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The post Ultra7z PDF Lossless Optimizer & Compressor 1.01 first appeared on Super Compression - useful programs/tools and information!.

MP3packer
Copyright (c) 2006-2012 Reed Wilson (“Omion”)
cedilla AT gmail DOT com

In “Good” mode program try choose the minimum frame size to fit the data and will also minimize the data size. This is completely lossless, and is equivalent to decompressing a ZIP file and recompressing with a more aggressive setting. In “Best” mode it attempts to minimize the data by doing a brute-force search for the optimal parameters, so it takes longer than it would normally.

Features:
– Reduce the size of high bitrate CBR files, turning them into VBR files.
– Writes valid LAME Xing header for proper VBR seeking.
– Full compatible with original MP3 format.
– Supported format: MP3.
– Option “Strip metadata (ID3v2 tags etc)”.
– Option “Copy time creation from source file”.
– You can set «Run in background (without console output)» or uncheck it for manual process control.

Run only 1 active instance of the program!

Current file has its own status in the list: «running», «done» and «saved space».
Full stats:
1. Number of optimized files (total and current session).
2. Files in the queue (quantity).
3. Saved disk space (Mb) total and for each file in the list.
(You need to save files «res\size.txt» and «res\numbers.txt» before updating, if you want to save the overall statistics («Total»)).

You can specify the path to the file «mp3packer.exe» manually in a separate form.

Please send any bugs and requests to maxcompress@ya.ru whith subject “Ultra7z MP3 Lossless Optimizer”

It’ free for commercial and non-commercial use!

If you like my program and you want help improve it, you can help me (donate) here.

Icon made by Dimitry Miroliubov from Flaticon:
https://www.flaticon.com/authors/dimitry-miroliubov

History:
2021-06-07
Ultra7z MP3 Lossless Optimizer 1.02
-internal optimizations

2020-06-24 – 1.01
– first release

Download Ultra7z MP3 Lossless Optimizer 1.02 (3 Mb):
Download here (3 mb)
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The post Ultra7z MP3 Music Lossless Optimizer 1.02 first appeared on Super Compression - useful programs/tools and information!.

Features:
– Full compatible with original JPG format
– High compression ratio — usually better than your programs / photo camera or smartphone.
– Supported formats: JPG, JPEG (photos, pictures, images etc…)
– Option “Strip metadata (exif etc…)”.
– You can set «Run in background (without console output)» or uncheck it for manual process control.
– Option for lossy compression.
– Option for Guetzli (20-30% better, but very slow).
– Option for arithmetic coding (10% better, for advanced users only!)

Run only 1 active instance of the program!

Current file has its own status in the list: «running», «done» and «saved space».
Full stats:
1. Number of optimized files (total and current session).
2. Files in the queue (quantity).
3. Saved disk space (Mb) total and for each file in the list.
(You need to save files «res\size.txt» and «res\numbers.txt» before updating, if you want to save the overall statistics («Total»)).

You can specify the path to the file «jpegtran.exe» manually in a separate form.

MozJPEG reduces file sizes of JPEG images while retaining quality and compatibility with the vast majority of the world’s deployed decoders. MozJPEG is based on libjpeg-turbo. Progressive encoding with “jpegrescan” optimization. It can be applied to any JPEG file (with jpegtran) to losslessly reduce file size.

Progressive images. Is a technique to smartly load the jpeg images of your app by demand, using small placeholders while the original image is being lazy loaded. Optimize Huffman table (smaller file). DC scan optimization. Trellis optimization of DC coefficients. Use integer DCT method. Reducing compression artifacts for text on white background and better quality for high-resolution images.

More info about MozJPEG here

Guetzli is a JPEG encoder that aims for excellent compression density at high visual quality. Guetzli is a freely licensed JPEG encoder developed at Google Research Europe in Zürich, Switzerland by Jyrki Alakujala, Robert Obryk, and Zoltán Szabadka. Guetzli-generated images are typically 20-30% smaller than images of equivalent quality generated by libjpeg. Note that Guetzli is designed to work on high quality images. You should always prefer providing uncompressed input images (e.g. that haven’t been already compressed with any JPEG encoders, including Guetzli). While it will work on other images too, results will be poorer.

More info about Guetzli here

JPEG arithmetic coding.
It can be used as a replacement for Huffman coding in the final step of JPEG compression. And it is more effective and the files using arithmetic coding are a bit smaller. Between 5% and 12%. The sad thing is that the JPEG standard had this option, but nobody dared to use it due to software patents and the previous disaster with GIFs. Three years ago the patent expired and the standard JPEG library included the long abandoned option to use arithmetic coding.

Please send any bugs and requests to maxcompress@ya.ru whith subject “Ultra7z JPG Lossless Optimizer”

It’ free for commercial and non-commercial use!

If you like my program and you want help improve it, you can help me (donate) here.

Icon made by icon king from www.freeicons.io
https://www.freeicons.io/profile/3

History:
2020-07-11 – 1.11
– Option copy metadata for Guetzli (exif etc).
– Guetzli now works with any jpg files.

2020-07-04
Ultra7z JPG/JPEG Photo Lossless/Lossy Optimizer 1.10
– Option for lossy compression.
– Option for Guetzli (20-30% better, but very slow).
– Option for arithmetic coding (10% better, for advanced users only!)

2020-06-21
Ultra7z JPG Lossless Optimizer 1.01
– first release

Download Ultra7z JPG Lossless Optimizer 1.11 (3 Mb):
Download here (3 mb)
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Features:
– High compression ratio.
– Option “Use maximum compression”.
– Option “Use extreme compression (~7x slower)”.
– Supported formats: flac, wav.
– Option “Remove only pictures (cover art etc)”.
– Option “Remove ALL metadata (name, title, album etc)”.
– Output files have their timestamps/permissions set to match those of their inputs.
– Option “Delete source file only if result is smaller”.
– You can set «Run in background (without console output)» or uncheck it for manual process control.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file.

FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and the only one that at once is non-proprietary, is unencumbered by patents, has an open-source reference implementation, has a well documented format and API, and has several other independent implementations.

Lossless: The encoding of audio (PCM) data incurs no loss of information, and the decoded audio is bit-for-bit identical to what went into the encoder. Each frame contains a 16-bit CRC of the frame data for detecting transmission errors. The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing an MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data in the file header, which can be compared against later during decoding or testing.

Fast: FLAC is asymmetric in favor of decode speed. Decoding requires only integer arithmetic, and is much less compute-intensive than for most perceptual codecs. Real-time decode performance is easily achievable on even modest hardware.

Hardware support: FLAC is supported by dozens of consumer electronic devices, from portable players, to home stereo equipment, to car stereo.

Flexible metadata: FLAC’s metadata system supports tags, cover art, seek tables, and cue sheets. Applications can write their own APPLICATION metadata once they register an ID. New metadata blocks can be defined and implemented in future versions of FLAC without breaking older streams or decoders.

Seekable: FLAC supports fast sample-accurate seeking. Not only is this useful for playback, it makes FLAC files suitable for use in editing applications.

Run only 1 active instance of the program!

Current file has its own status in the list: «running», «done» and «saved space».
Full stats:
1. Number of optimized files (total and current session).
2. Files in the queue (quantity).
3. Saved disk space (Mb) total and for each file in the list.
(You need to save files «res\size.txt» and «res\numbers.txt» before updating, if you want to save the overall statistics («Total»)).

You can specify the path to the file «flac.exe» manually in a separate form.

More info about FLAC here

Please send any bugs and requests to maxcompress@ya.ru whith subject “Ultra7z Flac Optimizer”

It’ free for commercial and non-commercial use!

If you like my program and you want help improve it, you can help me (donate) here.

Icon made by Swifticons from Flaticon.com
https://www.flaticon.com/authors/swifticons

History:
2020-09-06
– first release

Download Ultra7z FLAC Music Lossless Optimizer 1.01 (3 Mb):
Download here (3 Mb)
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The post Ultra7z FLAC Music Lossless Optimizer 1.01 first appeared on Super Compression - useful programs/tools and information!.