Photoshop used to have problems saving ‘proper’ png files. They used to be silly large and have color-space problems. Well, it seems Photoshop is probably getting this right now but it still tends to create silly large image files which, when used in a web template, are a bit of a pain in the arse.

We found Pngcrush seemed to do a rather better job of compressing (and fixing) the PNG. You can download this from sourceforge for windows/linux  here: Pngcrush

I use a Mac, so finding it for Mac OS X isnt easy, but here isa version compiled by a colleague. Its quite an old version. pngcrush for mac os x

And heres how I use it:


unzip and move to /usr/local/bin

cd to the directory containing some PNG images.
pngcrush -rem gAMA -d fixedpngs *.png

(This command creates a directory called ‘fixedpngs’ and puts the processed png’s into it)

 

(Eddie: If you happen, like me, to be a heathen and use a windows based machine there is also awindows command prompt version of pngcrush which is very easy to use with the  command [pngcrush.exe infile.png outfile.png])