A Case for PNG

[gare]

A Case for PNG

The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file format has been around for year, 10, specifically, and yet it has not received widespread adoption among Pixel People. And that?s a shame, because it was primarily invented to kill off the GIF format?the holders of the compression patents on GIF, licensed primarily to CompuServe, a leisure service of AOL?do as most small companies do when their revenue is on the ebb: they sock it to the player with deep pockets such as Adobe Systems and Microsoft, and threaten to tax the end-user for rights. PNG is, and always will be free; it uses lossless compression, unlike JPEG, it?s capable of either 24-bit saving with or without an alpha channel, or 16-bit (HighColor, 16,000 colors) with or without a 1-bit mask. And it supports animation, although no program to my knowledge will write a multi-image png. And no Web browser?Explorer, Firefox, or Safari?is capable of displaying an animated png if you could easily create one.

So let?s write to Mother Microsoft and Apple and Monzilla and see if we can?t get a grass roots movement for png going?it?s about time! Xara uses this format for thumbnail previews, and I personally am migrating ponderously large TIFF images with alphas to PNG (example: I got a 100MB file down to a 16MB png with alpha support). You really don?t take a performance hit by using png, either; not like using LZW compression with a TIFF.

Mark, how?s about offering png upload attachments?

What say you all?

My Best,

Gare

[sfm]

Hey Gare... just reading this see......
Microsoft's plans for IE7 spilled .........
So What's Actually Happening?

We won't know until summer, it appears. A March 9 posting by Wilson hinted that the development team would be posting some details later and solicited feedback on specific things people wanted to see. The 4,000-odd responses that generated (many of them unhappy in tone) made it pretty clear that people wanted to see a relatively small set of improvements. Almost everyone who responded seriously asked for improvement to PNG support, so that transparency would finally work and the Web could finally move away from GIFs. Most also demanded changes to the support of Cascading Style Sheets in some way.
snippet taken from http://www.sitepronews.com/

we wait and wonder huh :\
sfm

[gare]

Hey, Sue...good to virtually see you around here!

Adobe needs to support png transparency in their product line!
CS2 supports png, but won't export an alpha; at least, not with my copy of PS.

Which makes archiving masked images a royal pain! TIF is too large, psd isn't read my many programs, and Targa doesn't save resolution information.

XARA does, though

My Best,
Gare

[sfm]

he he he thought I would sneak in 8[ 8[ 8[ whooooooooosh
I don't use PNG all that much because it either isn't suported or is such a hassel and when time is very precious round here currently working 3 jobs [confused] I need to get work done first time
sfm

[sfm]

just a quickie

[sPECtre]

If you are interested in outputting PNG's check those tuts:
About PNG: http://user.fundy.net/morris/photoshop27.shtml
Saving a proper PNG: http://user.fundy.net/morris/photoshop03.shtml

[gare]

Hi, and thanks for the links!

However, I still can't seem to get PS CS2 to save an alpha out to png format!

Does anyone else have this problem?

My Best,
Gare

[sPECtre]

Hello, Gary!
I'll try at home with CS2, but I don't recall any discussion of a change in CS2 in that regard.

Can't get transparency, even in SFW?
Or do you want to save a PNG with a separate alpha channel?

Speaking of PNG, here is another link: http://www.fnordware.com/superpng/

[gare]

Hi, sPECtre--

Getting a png saved w an alpha really isn't a problem per se; I can do this with Xara. The thing is, I'd like to set up a PS Action where all the alpha-enabled TIFFs in a folder get saved out in png format, with the alpha intact.

By hand, I've cleaned out almost a gig on my HD by converting formats, but doing it by hand is a chore!

My Best,

Gare

[Welles]

Gare,

I've just started using PNG files for the first time with a piece of Mac software called Comic Life. In the program you use panels into which you drag your images, generally TIFF format. However the program supports transparency in PNGs. One can drag a secondary panel above the first, change the panel attributes of border, fill, and shadow, to none and the PNG alpha channel is operative...even though there is no apparent alpha channel in PSD. Here's an example. The helicopter was saved as a PNG from Photoshop CS. It was a single layer with transparency. Placed in an invisible panel, it looks like a floating layer. The image of the copter itself has a drop shadow applied in Comc Life.