Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Creating PNG Files

While browser support played a part in PNG’s slow adoption, the other side of the coin was the lack of image tools that could do the PNG format justice. For a while, decent PNGs could be created only with fairly obscure command-line utilities (see the sidebar "For PNG Geeks Only“). Fortunately, decent (albeit often incomplete) PNG support is now available in most professional graphics programs. This section outlines the ins and outs of creating PNGs in the two most popular professional web graphics tools, Photoshop/ImageReady and Fireworks.

Tip

For a comprehensive list of image editing tools and graphics file converters that support PNG compression (as well as their known bugs), see the official PNG site at http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngaped.html.