Creating PNG Files
The good news is that there are quite a few tools out there for both PCs and Macs that can save files in PNG format. The bad news is that not many support special features such as alpha channel transparency or gamma correction. Furthermore, some programs that create PNG files do not compress them as well as they could (including Adobe Photoshop 4.0 and PaintShop Pro).
Table 21-2 lists PNG feature support in a number of popular graphics tools. For a more comprehensive list of image editing tools and graphics file converters that support PNG compression (as well as their known bugs), see http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngaped.html.
Table 21-2. Graphics applications that support PNG format
|
Application |
Alpha-channelTransparency |
Binary 8-bit Transparency |
Multilevel 8-bit Transparency |
Gamma Correction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Adobe Photoshop 5.5/ImageReady 2 |
Yes |
Yes |
— |
— |
|
Adobe Photoshop 4.0/5.0 |
Yes |
— |
— |
— |
|
JASC PaintShopPro 4 and higher[a] |
partial |
Yes |
— |
— |
|
JASC PaintShopPro 3 [a] |
— |
Yes |
— |
— |
|
Macromedia Fireworks 4.0[b] |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
— |
|
Macromedia Freehand 8 and higher |
Yes |
— |
— |
— |
|
Macromedia Freehand 7 |
Yes[c] |
— |
— |
— |
|
Adobe Illustrator 7.0 and higher |
— |
— |
— |
— |
|
CorelDRAW 7 and higher |
read-only |
— |
— |
— |
|
The GIMP |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
[a] PaintShop Pro 3 reportedly creates unnecessarily large palette files. This is fixed in Versions 4.0 and later. [b] PNG is the native file format for Macromedia Fireworks and is supported in all versions. [c] Freehand 7 preserves ... | ||||
Get Web Design in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
