I’m trying more and more to get by sans PhotoShop for my personal/freelance work. I do primarily web work these days and don’t do enough side gigs to justify keeping up with the Creative Suite beast.
Alas, that does bring to the table some limitations. On OSX I’ve been enjoying Pixelmator but it has woefully inadequate PNG export support. I can dump it out as a PNG then use one of the many great PNG optimizers like PNGCrusher and can reduce the size fairly well.
Alas, all of the PNG optimizing tools I’ve found are purely lossless.
Is anyone familiar with a tool (other than PhotoShop) that would offer up some lossy PNG compression options as well like reducing the color pallet, converting 32bit to 24 or 8bit, etc?
Addendum: I’m open to OSX or Windows software. I could even fire up Ubuntu if I had to, I suppose…
Answer
There were some good answers to this png compression question on SU. One or more of those might well fit the bill.
Irfanview has excellent png support in its PNGOUT plug-in, and it’s free for non-commercial use. It’s been a while since I played with it, but iirc it did include lossy (color table) compression.
That said, I’m fairly certain png output in Photoshop hasn’t changed since roughly the end of the last Ice Age, and I don’t see any signs of it changing any time soon, so if you have any version of PS its png capabilities won’t be outdated.
And all that said, this is all about bandwidth. But bandwidth is fast becoming a non-issue, and in parallel with that the importance of image super-compression, minified code and all the other optimization tricks that have exercised the webdev community for years is fading rapidly. Even for mobile broadband devices, bandwidth won’t be a concern for 95% of users within the next two to three years.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : DA01 , Answer Author : Community