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]

png and Photoshop

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]

Happy Mothers Day Mums

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]

sPECTRe

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]

Nope, but SW yep.

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]

Use of PNGs

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.

 

[Lee]

Okay, I'm on-board. Just downloaded (and switched) my PS PNG plug-in with the Super PNG plug-in. Now for some experimentation - always a dangerous undertaking at my level of PS knowledge. [confused]

Film at 11

 

[Lee]

UPDATE:

Well, I must admit, I confused now (nothing new there). I downloaded the SuperPNG plug-in and got it exchanged with Adobe's PS PNG plug-in. No problem. I then downloaded the PNGQuant and it says to put it in the Windows C:/System 32 folder. I got as far as the Sys. 32 folder but can't find where to put the downloaded file. I also downloaded the DOS optimizer PNGCrush but don't know what to do with that either.

Without using any of the above downloads I opened PS and saved an image using the new SuperPNG option. Seems to work fine but then again I don't have a clue what the hell I am doing.

Any suggestions.

 

[Moltas]

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.

Aren't you talking about MNG instead of PNG? MNG is the precessor of PNG
http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
There is something called aPNG but what I have heard it isn't really stable yet...I found this on the web:

Not everything smells of roses when considering PNG. Lately, animated GIFs are all the rage on the Internet. Unfortunately there is no animated PNG format and there will never be an official one. The PNG consortium does allow extensions to the format, but this may lead to a multitude of animated PNG formats being made (which is bad, because there will be no standard). In this case it probably is better to still use GIF.

If you want transparent PNGs you can get them to work with IE but it involves some nasty tricks. I made a small web application that uses transparent PNGs for a local company.
http://www.renmarksmaleri.se/2004/fiona/index.cfm
It's in swedish but you can try to click the different images to change foreground and background.

With that said, I still agree that the support for PNG is suprisingly poor. The PNG format is very interesting and has a lot of potential.

/Moltas

 

[theKeeper]

Mark, how?s about offering png upload attachments?

I've always had PNG support here Gary. I LOVE PNGs!

In fact... in case anyone's interested, here's a list of the file formats you can upload on the Forum.

PS: take a look at the extension on my attached image below.
And Sue uploaded a PNG as well.

When uploading any files, just click the text "Allowed Extensions and Sizes" to see what you can and can't upload. :B

 

[gare]

Okay...

Hi, Mark--

My oversight. Attached is a png, with the stars as a transparency.

Moltas--I've never heard of mng; what I was mentioning in my original post was png, but I'd certainly love to learn about a new file format.

Lee, I'm sorry that the plug-in was causing so much headache, but if you've got a lot of tiffs hangin' around your hard drive, alphas or no, converting them to png will save you hard disk space, with little or no system performance hit when opening or saving the images.

Hi, Welles! Nice composition!
I see you're using Aurora--I got version 2 a while back. Expensive, but as you can see in this image, Aurora 2 does nimbus clouds in 3D space. IMO, the upgrade is worth it...

My Best,

Gare

 

[Welles]

Re: Okay...

Hi, Welles! Nice composition!
I see you're using Aurora--I got version 2 a while back. Expensive, but as you can see in this image, Aurora 2 does nimbus clouds in 3D space. IMO, the upgrade is worth it...

Haw, you recognized that preset. It is #1 in the list and I was just doing a quick image.

I love the 3D clouds too. Occasionally I'll use Aurora for making an image background but more often I'll use it for making a new and dramatic sky for a photo.

The helicopter was just one of the stock models which came with Digital Element's Modelshop. I like all three of their plugins but they are expensive. }:\

 

[gare]

Well, I finally learned something!

Moltas, please excuse my ignorance, and Mark, thanks for the link! I see Steve Rimmer is still hackin' away at animation formats, and still trying to sell his sci-fi novels . He's done much better with mng animation tools than his gif predecessor, but ya still need PS to color reduce well.

I tried ImageReady GIF, at 32 colours and a one bit mask---terrible dithering, and 78K saved (9 frames). The mng equivalent is about the 59K, but with pattern dithering (doing this helps disguise banding on gradient fills), the images are a lot cleaner, and 256 colors.

I'm uploading the GIF, cuz your board sez mng extensions are not allowed! So how's about it, oh Keeper?

BTW, Microsoft should encorporate the mng plug-in in the next rev of IE, no?

I did the animation frames using trueSpace.

My Best,
Gare