PNG’s stand for (Portable Network Graphics) and is a raster graphic file that supports lossless data compression and full transparency. To a non-digital artist, the previous sentence may mean next to nothing. Understandable. A totally non-technical explanation of PNG’s which is in no way all encompassing, is that they are graphic formats that can preserve your image transparencies.
As an example, say you have an image that displays an apple on a transparent background. If you save this image as a JPG, it will automatically add a white background to the image and in doing so, limiting your creative options. If you save it as a PNG, the background of the image will remain transparent. Simple as that.
Of course, there are many additional features of the PNG format that distinguish it between JPG’s, GIF’s, and TIFF’s. One of the drawbacks of the PNG file format is that they frequently tend to be larger in size than their JPG counterpart. The art of image optimization which is about balancing image size with image quality warrants multiple blog posts on its own. This article is intended to share a free online tool that’s proven extremely helpful in the quest for mastering this art. It’s a service called TinyPNG. You can read up on the technical details of their technology by visiting their website: https://tinypng.com/
1. Simply Upload your images (s)
2. Compress them
3. Download them
Very simple indeed. They offer a paid for plugin that will integrate directly with Photoshop and save you the time of visiting their website every time you want to compress PNG’s.
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