Dragan Babić is a designer guy who blogs on interface and information design, xhtml, css, usability, accessibility, user centric design and user experience and more.

Optimize png files for Internet Explorer 2006-12-02 17:49


You all may already know of a little inconsistency that is exists between ie and Firefox regarding the rendering of png files – they seem to render a little bit darker in internet explorer when Adobe Photoshop’s „Save for Web” option is used. Up ‘till a while ago I was wondering too why the hell is that happening?

I have done a little research, and the result wasn’t really suprising – ie doesn’t handle png images all that well – no suprises there… Apparently every png image has some gamma data written into it and ie can’t understand it – ergo it can’t parse it. Now I’m no expert in this field but it is evident that it is causing the little difference in nuances that really are all the difference when you are slicing the image to blend it in with a background of an element (i.e. making rounded corners).

PNGGauntlet To The Rescue

I have found this PNGGauntlet tool that does the job rather well. In fact – it goes a step further as to even compress your images to the maximum stripping out all the comments and unnecessary data from the file.

This is a great little app that has become one of the standard programs I use in everyday work.

2006-12-02 17:49; 4 comments

  1. Milano on 11/12/06 06:15 PM comments:

    Thanks for the tip. I had the same problem with pngs in the past. Btw, beside ie the same problem exists in Safari on os X.

  2. danny on 19/01/07 02:14 PM comments:

    Gauntlets good 4 importing pngs in2 flash. I wonder about PS aliasing settings on text in regards to exporting pngs without fuzzy-edges. just went thru this with .gif… sadly clients dont care

  3. nlecam on 17/04/07 11:30 PM comments:

    Just give a try also to Fireworks (yes, the recently dead Macromedia imaging software). His analysis and rendering of PNG files is the last thing that aparted me from throwing it away from my applications, but it is really amazing to see the difference of optimization between PS and FW.
    Just give it a try and you’ll see the difference…

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