How to Reduce the size of transparent PNGs

Mar 26, 2021

Carlton Johnson
By Carlton Johnson

Hi all,

Some of my transparent PNGs in my eLearning are larger (KB wise) than I would like. I'm wondering what methods others use to reduce the size of transparent PNGs.

I have done a lot hunting around forums and asking but I haven't found anything that really works well yet. I have Adobe Creative cloud so can use any of that suite that might help.

I have used tinypng before and the file really gets reduced in size but sometimes the quality isn't great so ideally, I want more control.

I recently tried pnggauntlet which reduced the size a little, but not much. I got good results in photoshop by going to file - > export as, then in file settings I click on smaller file (8 -bit). This worked well but I'm not sure if it reduces the quality. It looked fine, but need help from someone better at graphics to let me know if using this option lessens the quality.

Help... My course is taking too long to load and I want to eliminate if the size of my images is the problem. 

 

Thanks in Advance

4 Replies
Carlton Johnson
3 years ago03/28/21 at 11:17 am (UTC)

Hi Math, thanks for your reply, that's really useful. I wonder if the plugin is related to the https://tinypng.com/ site. It sounds like it is. I used that site a few times and was really happy with the reduction in size but then used it recently and the quality of the output wasn't good so I got concerned. 

You mention it's a plugin. How are you using it as a plugin. I'm used to plugins in wordpress but not in many other contexts, is it a plugin related to wordpress, storyline, your web browser or something else?  It would be great if you could provide a link.

In the back of my mind I still have a nagging thought of surely one of the adobe products in creative cloud have an effective way to do this for transparent pngs without losing any noticeable quality in the image, but I have yet to find the answer in photoshop, illustrator or elsewhere. 

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