Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) has demonstrated advantages in image compression due to its time-frequency resolution property. Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DTCWT) in addition to the advantages of DWT supports additional properties such as directionality and shift invariant. DTCWT has coefficient redundancy of 4:1 or 2 m :1 in m dimensions thus is four time complex than DWT computation. In this work, DTCWT based image compression algorithm is proposed that performs decomposition using DTCWT and reconstruction is carried out using DWT. The DTCWT bands are companded and encoded using entropy encoder and the quantization of the sub bands introduces minimum loss. The proposed algorithm achieves 77% compression with 40 dB PSNR thus suitable for real time image compression. DTCWT filters are appropriately selected to achieve perfect reconstruction.