Image Alchemy

Image Alchemy is a 1990s-era command-line utility for image processing and image format conversion. It was developed by Handmade Software, Inc.

It is commercial software, but demo versions were released whose only limitation is that they do not support images larger than 640×480 pixels. Supported platforms include MS-DOS, Windows console, Macintosh, various Unix systems, and apparently OS/2.

It has good documentation of its supported formats, and is capable of writing (not just reading) the large majority of them.

Versions
The downloads are mostly MS-DOS demos.

Documentation

 * alchemy.pdf - For version 1.11

Most of the demo distributions (see the Versions section above) include a documentation file named ALCHEMY.DOC (which may be inside a MANUAL.EXE LHA self-extracting archive) or ALCHEMY.PDF. There may also be supplemental documentation in ADDENDUM.* or UPDATE.* files.

Native formats

 * BIF (.bif)
 * HSI Raw (.raw)
 * Histogram (.hst) (refer to HSI Raw)
 * HSI JPEG (.hsi, .jpg)
 * HSI Palette (.pal)
 * Multi-Image Palette (.pal)

Supported formats
This list is from version 1.11.

Links

 * Handmade Software website (2006 archive)