Improving PNG Image Compression with ‘PNGCrusher’
As I’ve mentioned previously I am an advocate of PNG images (Portable Network Graphics). It supports 24bit colour and greyscale, but even more importantly, its lossless and supports 8bit transparency. I often use this transparency feature to create logos or banners (See wikipedia for more details).
However one thing I noticed was that they can be considerably larger than GIF or JPG images… significantly larger; but this can be easily rectified. I run OS X, so I don’t have an opinion on any windows apps, but
is brilliant at taking PNGs and recompressing them. All you do is drop and drag your file and PNG performs its magic. For example:
40Kb before compression
28Kb after compression
This was quite a complex image, on something as simple as a logo I’ve seen a reduction in size 9x times over (8Kb from 72Kb). This dramatic decrease in size will help my site to load faster, reduce the bandwidth required by myself and the user. Efficient!