About Miptz

Precision processing for modern formats. Miptz is a Paris design-technology cooperative that grew out of a magazine retouching desk. Most of our team are former retouchers who learned web tooling because they got tired of online converters dropping their ICC profiles or adding unsharp mask in the wrong place.

Editorial defaults, not benchmark defaults

Online converters typically tune for the smallest file at acceptable quality. Miptz tunes for the file a magazine art director would still accept. Default JPEG quality is 90, not the industry-standard 80, because skin tones band below that on tight studio crops. Default scaling kernel is bicubic, not Lanczos, because Lanczos exaggerates pores and stray hairs that the retoucher took the trouble to soften upstream.

What stays out of the canvas

The Miptz cropper does five things on purpose: select, rotate, mirror, reset, export. There is no clarity slider, no dehaze button and no AI fill. Tools that pretend to crop and retouch in the same surface tend to do both jobs poorly. Cropping in Miptz is a framing decision; retouching belongs in colour-managed desktop software, before or after the framing.

The colour space is not an afterthought

The converter reads embedded ICC profiles on input and embeds sRGB on output. EXIF orientation is honoured rather than silently dropped. Wide-gamut sources are perceptually compressed when targeting sRGB; that is expected behaviour for sRGB-centric browsers, not a bug. For colour-critical print delivery, finish in desktop pre-press software.

What we choose not to ship

Miptz does not ship CMYK separations, ink-limit profiles, or print-certified PDFs. We ship sRGB editorial-grade web and screen exports. The hand-off boundary is deliberate. A small Paris team cannot do every job; we do the framing and quality work, and we make a clean hand-off to the desktop tools that do the rest.

Atelier-scale economics

Miptz is supported by display advertising clearly demarcated from the editorial blog. The team is small enough that real names answer support e-mails; the editorial discipline is small enough that no article ships without a real-world test case behind it. We do not accept payment to feature specific brands, formats or vendors.

Getting in touch

For partnership requests, advertising enquiries or press, please use the same e-mail address with a subject line that starts with “Press” or “Partnership”. We aim to reply within two business days.

Meet the editor