Help with PNG and Macro Fireworks.

[Jazzhound]

Hey guys, I've been sampling the new MX 2004 stuff from Macromedia and I never really tried using Fireworks before as I own a copy of Photoshop 5.5, but did it out of curiosity. Now here is the kicker. I know PNG has long been a supported format so I gave it a try and saved a picture in PNG which appears to be default format under Fireworks 2004. Long story short, I ended up with a 3MByte file from what originally was only a 700kb photo I took in JPEG at 1600x1200 resolution.

Question is then, is it infact a native format that Fireworks uses and is compression similar to JPEG or more like GIF89?


Thanks guys

 

[Corvette]

Well for high quality pics, you have to sacirfice size

 

[Jazzhound]

This is a given, however I would not expect an 800x600 sized picture to take 3MBytes.

I read some tidbits about PNG and it appears to be superior to all other formats, almost like BMP. I just need to play around with Fireworks to optimize it for web use.

 

[SPeedY_B]

FireWorks native format is layered PNG32, if you want smaller PNG files you can use the export feature to use PNG8 with dithering, the compression is the same as GIF but in most cases better.
For images with many colours your better off wtih JPEG as PNG and GIF are excellent for compressing images with few colours/low detail (comics would be a good example) but a photograph for example may not look to good, unless you use PNG32, which as you know, creates large files.

For more info on png, take a look here: http://burnallgifs.org/
there's a lot of good info links and format compressions there.