The Origin:
Image Alchemy

01From Sunnyvale to McMurdo Station

Handmade Software Inc, founded by Allan Hessenflow and Marcos Woehrmann, built Image Alchemy in the early 1990s out of a straightforward but urgent need: digital images were multiplying across platforms, operating systems and scientific instruments, and almost none of them spoke the same language. The company's answer was a command-line conversion engine of unusual breadth — reading and writing dozens of raster formats, manipulating colour spaces, resampling dimensions and remapping palettes in a single pass.

Its reach was remarkable. Image Alchemy processed files for desktop publishers and print shops, for GIS analysts working with Erdas LAN data, and for satellite researchers handling AVHRR imagery from NOAA’s NESDIS division. It ran at places as remote as McMurdo Station, Antarctica, where reliable format conversion was less a convenience than an operational necessity.

No portraits are shown — this is a factual heritage record, not a personal profile.

02What it could handle (and where it stopped)

Image Alchemy’s capabilities followed a consistent pattern: read support almost always outran write support, making it a powerful ingestion-and-conversion tool rather than a complete production pipeline.

Format	What it was	Alchemy’s support
BMP	Windows’ pixel-faithful standard	Full 1–24-bit, read + write; only HLS colour unsupported
AVHRR (.sst)	NOAA satellite sensor data	Read 8/11-bit, write 11-bit — but dropped the upper bits and all non-graphic metadata
Erdas LAN/GIS	Multi-band spectral imagery	Read + write bands 1 & 3; band 2 (green) unsupported, so no full true-colour composite
Autodesk FLC	8-bit indexed animation	Read-only — usable for frame extraction
Calcomp CCRF	Thermal-transfer plotter output	1-bit CMYK write, landscape, padding and dot-expansion — well served
Adobe PDF	The rising document standard	Recognised content types, but could neither read nor write PDF directly — the growing gap

03Why it still matters

Image Alchemy occupied a niche that was important precisely because it was unglamorous: reliable translation between formats each tied to a specific vendor, instrument or operating system. When those formats proliferated faster than any single application could follow, a neutral conversion layer became infrastructure.

Its limitations were structural rather than careless — absent PDF write support, no full HLS colour management, incomplete GIS band compositing — gaps that grew more significant as those workflows matured. But its honest, thorough documentation of its own constraints was itself a form of reliability. Users knew exactly what they were getting.

Understand every format deeply, convert faithfully, document honestly — the formats have changed entirely; the problem hasn’t.

This guide takes its name from Handmade Software — the company behind Image Alchemy — as a genuine homage. The impulse that drove Hessenflow and Woehrmann is the same impulse behind every page here.