Imaging supported DXT image/texture compression since one of the earliest releases. Quality of compressed images isn't very high though (at least the compression isn't too slow). For future Imaging versions I plan to ditch the current compression code and add a new one. To be precise, two new ones - fast and lower quality (still probably better than current Imaging's compression), and slow and higher quality mode. Fast one will be based on Real-Time DXT Compression by Id Soft. I'm not decided on high quality one yet, but probably something like cluster fit algorithm from Squish library.

Mainly for testing purposes during implementation of these new methods, I want to create extension for Imaging that compares two images (original and one reconstructed from compressed original) and measures PSNR and some other quality metrics.

I'm also thinking of implementing DXT5 based format using YCoCg colorspace and PVRTC (texture compression currently used in iPhone).

Few links if you're interested:

• Brief DXTC overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression
• More technical details: http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/EXT/texture_compression_s3tc.txt
• YCoCg-DXT related: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/real-time-ycocg-dxt-compression.html

Here's some quick comparison of DXT compressors (click the image to see full size). Value in brackets is MSE (mean square error) - lesser number means compressed image is more similar to original.

APNG loading and animating implementation for Imaging wasn't very hard work. However, there are not that many test images to be found on the Internet and most of the available ones are very simple. They're usually not using disposal methods and are basically just collection of independent images. Big difference compared to GIF files - some of them were quite difficult to animate right. I even got most of nontrivial APNG test files by converting some more complex animated GIF files. Tools for creating APNG images are not yet as sophisticated as some GIF animation tools - there's GIF to APNG converter, APNG Anime Maker, and some web based tools that assemble simple APNG file from bunch of uploaded single PNG frames.

Now I'm gonna extend PNG saver to allow saving multi images to simple APNG files, much like MNG saving works now. There's really not a good unified way how to pass some more information to image file savers in current library design - that's one of TODOs for new Imaging architecture.

I started working on support for APNG format for Imaging library. APNG is unofficial extension of PNG image file format created by two guys from Mozilla Corporation. The point of APNG is to allow storing simple animations in PNG files (hence the "A" for "Animated").

There is already PNG-like chunk based format for animations called MNG (already supported by Imaging - at least the basic features). However, MNG is quite complex format and its support among browsers and image viewers/editors is lacking. Code library supporting all MNG features is huge.

APNG on the other hand is just an extension of PNG and its implementation is not so complex. I'm going to load only the raw frames from files at first and see what will have to be done to support animating the frames next. Canvas class will have to be used here for alpha blending subsequent frames to previous ones. I'll add option to turn the animating on/off just like it is available for animated GIF files.

More info about APNG: http://www.animatedpng.com and https://wiki.mozilla.org/APNG_Specification.