Retrobatch, a new batch image processor from Flying Meat

Looks like a heck of a swiss-army-knife of a tool. It’s node-based, supports CoreML image classification and sorting, and yep… it supports AppleScript. FM’s suggestions for new use cases contain fun, weird, stuff like “Read an image from the clipboard, apply a drop shadow, and write it right back to the clipboard to paste into another app.”

Retrobatch is available as a 14 day free trial, and licenses start at $29.99. Props to Flying Meat for being one of those third-party Mac development houses that just keeps going.

Crunch, an impressive new PNG compression tool for macOS

Crunch is a macOS tool for lossy PNG image file optimization. It combines selective bit depth, color type, and color palette reduction with zopfli DEFLATE compression algorithm encoding using embedded versions of the pngquant and zopflipng PNG optimization tools.

The example images are impressive. Obviously, you won’t want to use this on your archival or source images. I did a quick test on a few of sites at work, and was able to take some PNGs w/ transparent backgrounds down from 1.5mb to 130kb. That’s a greater than 10x reduction in size. Jimminy.

Layer Comps in Photoshop

Neven Mrgan just blew my mind:

Layer comps is a panel—found in the Window menu—which helps you organize different versions of a designs or different views of it in the same file. If you are a responsible digital citizen at all, you probably have some sort of system for keeping around alternate elements and various “views” of your app. Layer Comps will make this easier and more robust.

Had no idea this even existed.