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Einstein would be proud. Time and space are indeed related.
   technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Compress your images by a factor of 100 with LuraWave


April 9, 2000

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   I was stunned. In front of me were two apparently identical pictures on my ultra-high-resolution computer screen, side by side. One took up more than a 10 megabytes of space on my hard drive. The other occupied 100 kilobytes. The big file was 100 times the size of the small one, yet the pictures looked the same.
   That was my introduction to LuraWave. In all my years of computing, few things have fascinated me more.
   If you ever wanted to believe in magic, now's the time. If you're a veteran in the world of computer graphics, you'll have a hard time believing what I'm about to tell you. Stay tuned, because I'll also tell you how to get a free program that will do all this amazing image compression.
   LuraWave, invented by a company named LuraTech, is a way of squeezing images down to a mere fraction of their former size without degrading the quality.
   The name has "Wave" in it because the technique is known as "wavelet" compression. Amazingly, wavelet compression is able to recreate an entire damaged image as long as part of the image is OK. Let me explain this another way: Take a LuraWave image and chop up the file so you only have the right bottom corner and maybe a third of the lower section of the image. Let LuraWave software go to work on it, and you'll probably get most of the image back.
   And then there's the incredible Lura compression. A LuraWave image squeezed to 1/10th the size of a standard image is all but indistinguishable from the original. And when you create LuraWave images, you can even choose "lossless" compression, which produces no degradation of any kind. So no matter how finicky you are, you can save file space with LuraWave.
   But wait a minute. File space is cheap these days. Huge hard drives cost very little. So think of LuraWave as a way of speeding up the Internet and you'll be right on track with the future of image compression.
   How so? It's simple. If your computer is opening a Web page that has five pictures on it, you have to wait for those pictures to be sent across the Internet to your Web browser. Maybe you end up waiting 20 seconds. If those pictures could be compressed with LuraWave, they'd look the same but they'd be a lot smaller. And smaller files don't take as much time to send across the Web. So you'd see those pictures in 5 seconds instead of 20.
   Einstein would be proud. Time and space are indeed related. The larger the file, the more space it takes up and the more time you spend waiting for it to arrive.
   You might be thinking that we already have a way of squeezing images down to mere shadows of their former selves. It's called JPEG. You might see it called "JPG" and "Jpeg," too. Images compressed by the JPEG method can be a lot smaller than uncompressed images, but they lose quality. A JPEG image is inescapably damaged in one way or another by compression. (Try saving a common screen shot as a JPEG image and you'll see how JPEG messes up any writing on your screen.)
   At maximum usable compression, JPEG images might take up about 1/10th of their uncompressed sizes. In other words, they're compressed 10:1.
   That's child's play for LuraWave. How's 100:1 compression sound? It's easy, and LuraWave does an excellent job. An image that's 5 megabytes uncompressed can be squeezed down to 50 kilobytes as a LuraWave image.
   Amazing, right?
   Heck, I'm just toying with your brain. Why settle for compression of 100:1? Would you like 500:1? Naw, that's not good enough. How about 1,000:1?
   If you want to see LuraWave kick butts in the image-squeezing contest, start out with a 1-megabyte image and squeeze the living daylights out of it until it's only 10 kilobytes in size. That's 1,000:1 compression, an unthinkable ratio until LuraTech came along. What do you get? A LuraWave image that still looks recognizable. It won't win awards, but it will be an image you can make sense out of.
   To view LuraWave images on the Web, your browser needs a plugin from LuraTech. Plugins for the Windows, Macintosh and Linux Web browsers are available free from the company's Web site at http://www.luratech.com/. You'll also find a plugin for Netscape running on Sun Microsystems computers.
   You can also get a free LuraWave compression program for Windows -- and, surprisingly, a free one for Linux also. There's no free Macintosh compression program, but LuraTech does have plugins that work with Photoshop on the Mac and under Windows and with Paint Shop Pro under Windows. (The plugins are expensive, but you can try them out for free.)
   I created and viewed LuraWave images under Windows and Linux. The Windows software worked fine and was easy to use. The Linux software turned out to be a Lura-enabled version of the superb XV program, a fast image viewer and basic image editor available for all standard versions of Linux. I also tried the LuraWave plugin for Photoshop. It made creating LuraWave compressed images a simple matter.
   You can see examples of LuraWave images alongside normal ones at http://www.luratech.com/products/demos/lurawave/info02_e.html. (You don't need to have a special LuraWave plugin or other software to see the differences in the images on that site.)
   Once you get a LuraWave plugin for your browser or if you have one of the programs that will show LuraWave images, go to my Web site and look at samples of a photo I took in Vietnam in the late 1960s. (I was a war correspondent there. The photograph shows a Vietnamese child with others in her village waiting to be evacuated after an attack by military forces.) You'll be able to view the same photo at different levels of LuraWave compression.
   Here's the photo in a normal size (640 X 513), without compression. Here's the same photo with LuraWave compression set to lossless quality. It's half the size of the uncompressed version without any loss. Saving half the file space isn't very impressive, however. So let's see how LuraWave compression handles the same photo when it is much larger. This is a 1498 X 1200 version using lossless compression, the same size image at 100:1 compression, the image at 500:1 compression and again at 1000:1 compression. The 1000:1 image is only about 5 kilobytes, yet still shows a recognizable scene.
   LuraTech has at least three other fascinating ways of using wavelet compression. It has software that compresses documents called LuraDocument and separate software that squeezes videos much better than the current standard, called MPEG. (MPEG is JPEG for motion pictures.) It also has a video cataloging program based on its video compression methods.
   You can get free Web browser plugins for the document-compression system so that you can view documents on Web sites that use the new system. You can also get demo LuraDocument plugins for Photoshop.