Comments on: PNG Alpha Transparency – No Clear Winner

By: Aleksey Kirichenko

Aleksey Kirichenko — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:12:22 +0000

The English version of ImageOptim: http://imageoptim.pornel.net/

By: buy nintendo dsi r4

buy nintendo dsi r4 — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:21:26 +0000

The fact that Fireworks can export PNGs in so smart a way is one of the reasons I enjoy this program so much in my daily design life. Sometimes I pick up another approach: I create a PNG32 alpha image for all browsers, and serve to IE6 a simple GIF+index transparency. This works, too. So it depends on the specific task at hand. There are a lot of ways to “trick” IE6 to support Alpha transparency in PNG files, but none of them is 100% bullet-proof. So I prefer to serve to IE6 normal PNGs or GIFs or JPGs. I think also that it’s time for IE6 users to make the switch.

By: Dan Walker

Dan Walker — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 15:29:40 +0000

The problem with banding in Fireworks PNG8 is due to the way FW renders colors with transparency. PNG8-exact will render up to 256 colors which eliminates banding in many images, but there is no alpha transparency. PNG8-Adaptive renders alpha transparency, but for some odd reason greatly reduces the number of colors in the image, generally producing banding. Here’s the undocumented technique to use up to 256 colors with alpha transparency in Fireworks CS4.
1. Build your color table with PNG8-Exact
2. Select all the colors in the table and lock them.
3. Rebuild your color table with PNG8-Adaptive-Alpha transparency.
4. The alpha transparency colors are added to the exact colors in the table and produce a high quality PNG8 with alpha transparency. Of course if you still get banding with 256 colors, you’ll have to go to a PNG32.

By: Derek

Derek — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:17:33 +0000

The text for ImageOptim is in Polish.

Roughly (my Polish is quite basic)

ImageOptim is a graphics utility (GUI) for applying image optimisation
to graphics in PNG and JPEG format.

You get these tools : AdvPNG from AdvanceComp; etc, and optional PNGOUT

The PNGOUT utility [unsure here] hasn’t been ported to OS X since the PNGOUT licence terms don’t allow this.

You could easily obtain a better translation, but using the tool is probably easier.

By: brandon

brandon — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:27:14 +0000

Stoyan mentioned the follow
“Another example when PNG8 can’t work is if you check http://entertainment.yahoo.com, there are music videos and a “play” image on top of the thumbs.”
This is not exactly true … there is a fairly decent workaround to this.
Instead of creating a transparent image you can utilize css transparency.
Example:
yahoo movies indie film guide: (http://indiefilm.movies.yahoo.com/)
mousing over the movie trailers displays a transparent play icon
another example is in there photo page by mousing over the image a transparent arrow is displayed
both of these images are in the png 8 sprite: (http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/movies/ifg_sprite_4.png)

By: kkLL

kkLL — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:38:45 +0000

There’s an improved pngnq/pngquant, that could do much better job than Fireworks:
http://pornel.net/pngnq

By: Henry Ho

Henry Ho — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 03:15:09 +0000

Any tool other than Fireworks that does alpha transparency for PNG8?

By: Mark Kawakami

Mark Kawakami — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:48:18 +0000

Yeah, I’ve come to the same conclusion. Like it or not, there’s simply no great tool for optimizing PNGs on OS X. Photoshop, even the latest version, is way behind the times. I think Adobe no longer considers web developers creating production ready graphics to be one of PS’s target audiences. As such, I spend most of my time working with images in Fireworks, but the more I use it, the more I realize that it’s a buggy program that isn’t getting the love it needs (it came over from Macromedia). I’m using the CS3 version, and that has a whole lot of weird tricks and caveats you have to know in order to be able to use it, to the degree that I can’t actually explain to my co-workers exactly how to use it beyond the basics.

Fireworks CS4, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to have gotten much love in this area. I haven’t tried it out yet, but no where on Adobe’s site do they talk about any improvements to the image optimization portion of FW. In fact, they seem to be positioning FW as a tool to help comp entire web pages or Flash interfaces, rather than a tool for creating production-ready graphics. Lame.

I have no idea why Adobe thinks image optimization isn’t what their tools are supposed to do anymore, but they’re wrong. The amount of time I spend optimizing is huge and largely because the tools are lacking.

By: westworld | smaller images

westworld | smaller images — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:49:31 +0000

[...] gif was for logos, use png-8 instead (sidenote) [...]

By: Westworld » Blog Archive » smaller images

Westworld » Blog Archive » smaller images — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:00:37 +0000

[...] gif was for logos, use png-8 instead (sidenote) [...]