mezzoblue § Smaller PNGs
Let’s be honest; Photoshop is absolutely terrible at saving transparent PNGs for web use. Your choices are between an 8-bit with 1-bit transparency (better than a GIF in terms of file size, but no better in terms of transparency options) or a huge 32-bit PNG with alpha transparency. There’s no middle ground. You can run the resulting files through various PNG reduction utilities (PNGOUT, Pngcrush, or my personal favourite PngThing) but when the savings are a few hundred bytes off an 80KB file, the returns are slim.
I’m not in the practice of using Fireworks, so those of you who do can start gloating now. But as I thought about the problem a bit, I remembered that Fireworks has a few more options. Specifically, I remembered that you can save out 8-bit PNGs with alpha transparency, which seemed like the right mix.
And the resulting lower byte counts were respectable: 95KB › 11.7KB. 28KB › 4.6KB. 38KB › 8.9KB. 36KB › 7.1KB. 45KB › 7.3KB. 28KB › 4.7KB. etc.
