Best PNG export settings?

[Travis Love]

I primarily work with png’s in my website, and I know I am not compressing them well enough so I am wondering what I should aim for when exporting my images. My biggest will be around 960×350 and is a full color image.

Thanks

[Chris Coyier]

I always try seeing what they look like with the PNG-8 setting in Photoshop first. If it sucks, I try setting the # of colors to 256. If that still sucks, I just make it a JPG, unless it really needs the transparency. Generally, unless it’s a giant background image, if it’s over 150k or so, that’s way too big. Random posts in blog images I try and keep under 50k.

This is a good tool for getting the most out of PNG’s http://pmt.sourceforge.net/

[yoboubdir]

if you have an image with a lot o details you should use JPEG format, and if the image contains plain color it’s best to use PNG.

[Travis Love]

Thanks Chris. I like PNG for the transparency. That way I can recreate things in CSS3 and just put a png where I need it.

[noahgelman]

If you want, you can put the image through a compressor. Yahoo!’s Smushit is actually pretty awesome. You can upload groups of images at a time too. Shows you all the stats as it compresses them and they wouldn’t lose any transparency.

[yoboubdir]

nice article, thanks for sharing

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