DeBabelizer Pro 5 for Mac OS X

Boy, who'da thunk that it would have taken Equilibrium four-plus years to wake up from it's Windows-first (and seemingly, Windows-only) honeymoon and finally release a new version of DeBabelizer for the Mac? Hard to believe, but since DeBabelizer 3 was released in 1998, Mac users have received nary a whiff of where the once Mac-exclusive image processing powerhouse ran off to. Well, DeBabelizer is back for the Mac and better than ever. It's been given a Carbon injection to run natively on Mac OS X, had the "Pro" moniker added to its name, and brought up to version parity with its Windows counterpart, even if Equilibrium had to take the rather Netscapian measure of completely skipping a version number in order to do so.

What it is

If you're not already familiar with DeBabelizer, let me assume infomercial mode here for a minute, because DeBabelizer wears enough hats to almost be considered a distant cousin of one of Ron Popeil's miracle creations. Instead of slicing, dicing, and making julienne fries, DeBabelizer's three big uses are processing images and video, creating and manipulating palettes, and automating your workflow. I'm probably understating things a tad, but just about every one of DeBabelizer's hundreds of features can be placed into one of those three core functions. I'll break these down a little more as we move ahead, but at this point, you may be saying to yourself, "Well, I've got Photoshop, and it can do that kind of stuff too, so why would I need a program like DeBabelizer?" Glad you asked. True, programs like Photoshop have made great strides in recent releases with their ability to script and batch process multiple image jobs, but handling large numbers of images isn't really at the core of what those programs are built to do. Whereas Photoshop is designed for image editing, DeBabelizer excels at heavy-duty image processing. Perhaps a subtle difference, but an important one in realizing that there really isn't a whole lot of overlap between the two. Add in the fact that DeBabelizer does palette operations Photoshop can't even begin to dream of, and even encroaches into the realm of being a full-fledged QuickTime compression program, and you can see where the lines are drawn.

What it does

Let's pick some highlights out of what I referred to earlier as the three core functions of Debabelizer, so you can get a sense of the kinds of things it can do:

Image/Video Processing

The first thing you'll notice is that DeBabelizer is a veritable Swiss Army Knife when it comes to the image formats it understands (for a full list, click here). No matter what WPG, XWD, or TIM file you happen to have lying around or a client might send your way, rest assured you'll more than likely be able to open it and turn it into something useful. DeBabelizer is also very thorough in providing all kinds of information about your images. You're never more than one click (and sometimes, only one glance) away from accessing image properties such as size, width, height, color space, image type and creator, frame number, etc., whether you're in the Open dialog box (fig. 1) or have a bunch of active images already open within DeBabelizer (fig. 2).

Figure 1: Bunches o' image info can be gleaned right from the Open dialog.

Figure 2: Even more image info is available once the image is open.

Moving on to the actual processing features, pretty much anything you could conceivably want to do to your images is here, from basic canvas resizing all the way up to custom filter creation (fig. 3), and just about everything in between. Just keep in mind that DeBabelizer is all about image processing, not creation. You do have access to a very basic set of painting and fill tools that is suitable to repetitive touch-ups, but nothing near what a program like Photoshop will give you.

Figure 3: DeBabelizer's filter creation tool, called the Custom Convolution Filter.

What may come as a surprise to some is that DeBabelizer also adds a ton of value in video processing in addition to its still image functionality. DeBabelizer reads and writes several multi-image formats, from FLC/FLI files to Electric Image movies to QuickTime. It also has a couple of very good video-only tools, such as a nice set of field manipulation functions (fig. 4) as well as a pretty good, albeit somewhat hard to operate, bluescreen removal feature (fig. 5). Here's an example: let's say you have a 30 second QuickTime clip of an actor against a greenscreen, which you need to clean up, save as a bunch of Targa files, as well as make an animated GIF file to post as a preview on your web site. DeBabelizer can open the movie, combine the upper and lower fields into a single frame, perform the cleanup on the fuzzy part of the greenscreen using the bluescreen removal tool, save each frame as a Targa image (sequentially named, of course), apply an image resize, map the colors to the web-safe palette, mark the cleaned-up greenscreen area as transparent, and save as an animated GIF file, ready for posting. Pretty handy for repurposing assets.

Figure 4: DeBabelizer includes a nice set of options for getting rid of all of those nasty video fields.

Figure 5: The Bluescreen Removal tool does a nice job of isolating backgrounds of all colors, not just blue.

Palette Creation/Manipulation

Quite simply put, DeBabelizer is amazing at dealing with palettes. Worth a mention right away is the SuperPalette, which lets you create a single custom palette based on multiple images, or even multiple palettes. Plus, DeBabelizer lets you manipulate the colors in a palette directly, as well as combine several palettes into a single palette.

Here's a real-world example of palettes to the rescue: I've been using a trick for years on 8-bit Director projects (which still pop up from time to time; there are apparently still a lot of really old and slow computers with bad video cards out there in the business world). First, I'll take any images I have with just the interface or background elements and make a 58 color SuperPalette with them (fig. 6). This ensures that I have plenty of colors to map the interface elements to, since they'll always be on-screen and need to look as good as possible at 8-bit. Then I'll open up the Mac 256-color palette (included as a default palette in DeBabelizer) as an image, reduce the colors from 256 to 200, and stash this palette in DeBabelizer's temporary palette buffer. Using the Merge Palettes feature (fig. 7), I'll then combine the SuperPalette with 56 of the 58 colors in the stashed palette (leaving out the redundant black and white), make sure the first color in the merged palette is pure white and the last color is pure black so certain OSes wouldn't scream bloody murder when trying to display the palette, sort the palette colors according to RGB color, and save the palette as both a native palette in DeBabelizer as well as a Photoshop ACT file (fig. 8). In a relatively few steps, DeBabelizer let me easily create a custom 8-bit palette that makes both my interface elements as well as any photographs or anything else I place on the interface look pretty darned good for 8-bit. That's the power of DeBabelizer's palette creation and manipulation tools. Even better, DeBabelizer Pro 5 now lets you bring the same techniques to 16-bit palettes, so with a little tweaking it's entirely possible for 16-bit images to look every bit as good as 24-bit ones.

Figure 6: The 58 color custom SuperPalette, created from a set of 33 image files.

Figure 7: The Merge Palettes command in action.

Figure 8: DeBabelizer has the ability to read and write palettes in Photoshop ACT format.

Workflow Automation

The last member in the DeBabelizer power triumvirate, workflow automation, is a handy term I thought up to neatly categorize what could loosely be defined as the "nitty gritty" stuff: batch processing, scripting, and the few other pieces of miscellany that DeBabelizer includes in the arsenal. It's worth mentioning that DeBabelizer has about a hundred ways to do the same thing, meaning that it's very easy to establish a custom workflow that complements the way you like to work. If you're a drag-and-drop kind of person, great. If you like to do stuff manually, great. Even the way objects like the BatchList and Script windows talk to each other can be done in several different ways. I realize that this is a difficult concept to effectively describe using the written word, but suffice it to say that there is no one right way to get things done.

Batch processing is handled primarily through the BatchList window (fig. 9), where you can drag and drop images, entire folders, and even text-based lists of images and HTML pages for processing. You can create and save multiple batch lists directly from this window, as well as stash temporary batches and add images that you may have manually opened in DeBabelizer. Or, you can blow off the BatchList window altogether, opting instead to use the Batch Automation panel (fig. 10), which gives you several options to save images, create a SuperPalette, create catalogs, etc. You can choose any of the image sources in the Batch Automation panel that you can in the BatchList window, including saved batches, folders, text files, and even a watch folder, which DeBabelizer monitors for new files and then processes them automatically. You can even choose specific image formats to process at any time, disregarding any image type that doesn't match. And on, and on, and on. The possibilities here, while not exactly endless, are pretty darn close.

Figure 9: As you can probably see from the title, this is the BatchList window.

Figure 10: The Batch Automation panel in all its glory.

Once you've figured out what images you want to do stuff to, you have to tell DeBabelizer what you want done. This is where scripting comes in, and DeBabelizer's scripting implementation is straightforward but very powerful. The Script window (fig. 11) is very similar to Photoshop's Actions palette, so Photoshoppers should be comfortable writing scripts in DeBabelizer right from the giddy-up. The easiest way to write a script is to use the Record button, which watches what you do to a test image and then writes the script for you. Or, you can start from scratch and add commands from the miniature version of the menu bar found in the Script window. DeBabelizer takes it quite a bit further than Photoshop, though. First, you get a handy preview window, which shows you your source image before and after a script is applied, so you can monkey with your script to your heart's content and know just how it's going to end up without having to actually run it. New to version 5 is the long-awaited addition of conditional scripting, which, as far as I'm concerned, is well worth the upgrade price all by itself. If you're not the programmer type, conditional scripting means that DeBabelizer checks to make sure the image meets a certain set of requirements you place upon it, and if so, it will run an associated set of commands. In figure 11, I've written a conditional script that finally solves one of the biggest and most basic problems I had with DeBabelizer up until now. Let's say I have a batch of 1000 images I need to make conform to a height or width of 600 pixels, remap to the standard web palette, and save as a series of GIF files. Of those 1000 images, 437 are portrait images and 563 are landscape images. Before conditional scripting, I would have had to manually scan each image and divide the portrait images into one folder and the landscape images into another, to avoid the portrait images from being absolutely gi-normously tall, while the landscape images end up just right. Or vice-versa. Now that I have conditional scripting, I can tell DeBabelizer to check if the image's width is greater than the height, and if so, set that image to a width of 600 pixels. If not, it must mean the the height is greater than the width, which means that it should set the image's height to 600 pixels. And no, you don't have to know that nutty script syntax shown in figure 11 - DeBabelizer makes writing conditionals as simple as using a drop-down menu (fig. 12). This is a HUGE time saver, and is one of the more basic examples I could cite here. Another good scripting feature is the ability to export DeBabelizer scripts to AppleScript, which you can execute from within DeBabelizer or integrate into another AppleScript-based workflow.

Figure 11: Get used to being in the Script window - you'll be spending a lot of time here.

Figure 12: Conditional scripting is actually much easier than it sounds.

There are also a few non-destructive tools DeBabelizer includes that are worth mentioning, each of which can be written into a script and applied to a batch process. I call these non-destructive not because they are actually non-destructive, but because they don't actually do anything to the images themselves. Among these tools are the ability to rename files on the hard drive, changing the type and creator codes, batch deleting files, etc. Handy. Potentially dangerous, but handy.

Problems

With all the good stuff going for it, DeBabelizer does have a few glaring issues. First and foremost of which is the interface. Despite the fact that it lets you work with multiple images in the way you're most productive, the interface is the single greatest hinderance towards letting you achieve that level of productivity faster. Quite simply, until you know where everything is, DeBabelizer doesn't behave at all like you would expect a Mac program to, which is especially unfortunate considering DeBabelizer grew up on the Mac in the first place. And if my rapidly-approaching-thirty-year-old brain is remembering correctly, I don't think the interface has changed all that much since I first used DeBabelizer 1.61 back in 1994. This is not a good thing. The first cardinal sin is that the BatchList and Script windows aren't resizable. Considering how much time you spend in these windows, no resizing option is inexcusable, especially for those of us with a desktop resolution of 1280x1024 or larger. I am also very bothered by the reliance on small and vague icons for basic functions. Even after working with DeBabelizer for a while, the icons don't make a whole heckofa lot of sense. Equilibrium has attempted to address this problem, albeit in an extremely awkward way, by having the window grow another window to explain what a button does (fig. 13). I know Equilibrium has a lot of Windows users to think about, but there has to be a better way than this. Hint: look to the Mac OS X Finder toolbar for help here. Just a suggestion.

Figure 13: Grow, BatchList window, grow!

I'm also not a fan of having a miniature version of the menu bar stuck in the Script window (shown in fig. 11), as I keep wanting to go to the real menu bar to add commands to the script window. There's no reason that you shouldn't be able to use the menu bar at the top of the screen to add commands while the Script window is active.

Another big problem I have is the way DeBabelizer handles alpha channels; to be specific, it kind of stinks at it. It's a really awkward process to even view an image's alpha channel, much less manipulate it or use it to punch out transparent areas. And considering the number of image formats that support multiple alpha channels and/or transparency in some form or another these days, not having a straightforward way to add or manipulate alpha channels, and, in turn, using those channels to make transparencies in an image is very disappointing. For example, I'd love to use the bluescreen removal tool as only a first step in saving the resulting image sequence as transparent PNG files, rather than having to key out the background later on in the compositing process.

Two other minor nitpicks: one, the Mac OS X version won't let you use more than 31 characters in automatically-generated file names. Two, DeBabelizer still ignores layers when opening Photoshop files, opting instead to flatten the image into a single layer. Other programs can keep layers intact, and Photoshop has had layers since about the time O.J. fled in the white Bronco and Michael Jordan was playing minor league baseball. It would be marvelous if a future version of DeBabelizer finally added a more robust Photoshop filter.

The bottom line

There are so many different things that DeBabelizer is capable of, that I've literally only glossed over a few features in this review. And if you've made it this far, you've probably noticed that this isn't exactly a short review. So suffice it to say that DeBabelizer is packed with all sorts of good and useful stuff. But at $700, it isn't exactly a impulse purchase. My recommendation is to make sure DeBabelizer really helps you before you decide to pull the trigger, as, admittedly, DeBabelizer isn't for everyone. However, Equilibrium has been kind enough to provide a trial version at its web site so you can see for yourself. If you decide it's for you, chances are that it will more than likely pay for itself more or less immediately in the time you save, so it's definitely worth at least trying out.

If not for its interface troubles and weakness with alpha channels, DeBabelizer would have earned a rare Creative Mac Must Buy rating, but alas, it does have to get knocked down a peg for its shortcomings. Regardless, DeBabelizer is quite simply an indispensable tool for medium- to high-volume graphics processing, and as such merits a Strong Buy. DeBabelizer 5 is available now for Mac OS X/9 and Windows XP/2000/NT/ME/98. A full version will run you $700, with upgrades priced at $150.

Filed under: Review on October 21st, 2002

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