Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
Lossy PNG for true-color images (Velocity Conf ...
Search
Sponsored
·
Ship Features Fearlessly
Turn features on and off without deploys. Used by thousands of Ruby developers.
→
Kornel Lesiński
November 18, 2014
Design
920
2
Share
Lossy PNG for true-color images (Velocity Conf EU 2014)
Kornel Lesiński
November 18, 2014
More Decks by Kornel Lesiński
See All by Kornel Lesiński
SudWeb
kornel
0
250
Modern PNG compressors
kornel
13
1.2k
Handling binary data in JS
kornel
1
420
Mobblestouch — W3C Touch Events and gestures
kornel
2
760
Server-Sent Events
kornel
5
1k
"HTML5" Transport Protocol
kornel
3
420
Front-end Performance
kornel
5
530
Other Decks in Design
See All in Design
デザインの文脈を理解する:エンジニアがデザインカンファレンスに参加して得た学びと気づき
hypebeans
0
200
20260215独立行政法人科学技術振興機構(JST) 社会技術研究開発センター(RISTEX)ケアが根づく社会システム _公開シンポジウム
a2k
1
200
【pmconf2025】PdMの頭の中を見える化する体験構造図
kamechi7222222
1
2.4k
空間アプリ開発のフィードバックをCodexにするための抽象的なデザインツールの模索
karad
0
140
絵や写真から学ぶ、要素がもたらす副作用
kspace
0
350
デザイナーが主導権を握る、AI協業の本音と実践
satosio
7
3.3k
From the Visible Crossroads: Turning Outputs into Outcomes
takaikanako
2
1.4k
Mandalyn_DT5001_FinalAssignment.pdf
lynteo
0
230
つくり方を変えていく | change-how-we-build
mottox2
2
1.3k
富山デザイン勉強会_デザイントレンド2026.pdf
keita_yoshikawa
3
210
【優秀賞+特別賞】くまモン食いしん坊弁当「くまモンの魔法の柑橘弁当」最終審査資料
shoko_seven11
0
180
保育現場にAIを 〜人と技術に橋を架けるデザインで考えてきたこと〜 uiuxcamp2026-hoiku-ai-design
hiro93n
1
270
Featured
See All Featured
The World Runs on Bad Software
bkeepers
PRO
72
12k
Odyssey Design
rkendrick25
PRO
2
670
svc-hook: hooking system calls on ARM64 by binary rewriting
retrage
2
280
State of Search Keynote: SEO is Dead Long Live SEO
ryanjones
0
200
From Legacy to Launchpad: Building Startup-Ready Communities
dugsong
0
220
Optimizing for Happiness
mojombo
378
71k
世界の人気アプリ100個を分析して見えたペイウォール設計の心得
akihiro_kokubo
PRO
71
40k
How to Grow Your eCommerce with AI & Automation
katarinadahlin
PRO
1
200
Art, The Web, and Tiny UX
lynnandtonic
304
22k
Jamie Indigo - Trashchat’s Guide to Black Boxes: Technical SEO Tactics for LLMs
techseoconnect
PRO
0
160
SEO Brein meetup: CTRL+C is not how to scale international SEO
lindahogenes
1
2.7k
How Software Deployment tools have changed in the past 20 years
geshan
0
34k
Transcript
Lossy PNG Kornel Lesiński 2014
PNG Lossless JPEG Lossy
PNG PNG JPEG Lossless Lossy PNG Opaque Alpha Channel WebP
JPEG 2000 JPEG XR JPEG XT if you need lossy and alpha, it becomes complicated. You may need to serve 4 different files for every image!
flickr.com/photos/ama711/8760361969 0% 100% Lossy PNG is a hack, but it
works like a truly lossy format
Pixels Math gzip Standard PNG
None
gzip finds and removes repeated sequences of identical pixels
00000000 00000001 00000010 00000011 00000100 00000101 00000110 00000111 00001000 00001001
00001010 0 10 110 1110 11110 111110 1111110 11111110 111111110 1111111110 11111111110 → → → → → → → → → → → Instead of storing 8 bits per byte, gzip uses variable-length sequences. Most popular bytes are given shortest sequences.
Some images don’t have repeated pixels and few very popular
colors
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
0 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = = Instead of storing uncompressible absolute values PNG can store difference between neighboring pixels
5 6 4 6 5 5 6 4 5 4
5 + 1 -2 +2 - 1 0 + 1 -2 + 1 - 1 = = 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Noisy images won’t compress well… unless you fake the data and remove the noise
Pixels Math gzip Lies Lossy PNG trick is about replacing
math with lies. Only the encoder changes, so it’s 100% compatible.
? When PNG “guesses” what the next pixel will be,
it can make the guess based on average of 2 neighbors, which in lossy PNG causes blur
flickr.com/photos/tundra-ice/5124841152 Original: 2MB 0.6MB 0.3MB
Original: 2MB 0.6MB 0.3MB
Original: 221KB Lossy: 67KB ed_g2s
182KB flickr.com/photos/_tar0_/6223343149
27KB flickr.com/photos/_tar0_/6223343149 The algorithm can decide quality of every pixel,
so it tends to preserve sharp edges, especially text
28KB flickr.com/photos/_tar0_/6223343149 Top of the file has 0% quality, bottom
80% quality
• Works everywhere—fully backwards-compatible • No color limit—supports 24 and
32-bit PNG • Preserves edges—per-pixel quality control • Very fast—small tweak in the encoder • Streamable—only needs 2 lines of the image
pngquant -Q 75-100 --skip-if-larger \ -o out.png in.png || posterize
-b -Q 75 in.jpg out.jpg pngquant is often more efficient, but can’t guarantee quality. You can combine the two for best results.
pngmini.com — ImageAlpha GUI github.com/pornel/mediancut-posterizer CLI logicnet.dk/Analyzer — Image Analyzer
GUI @pornelski pngmini.com/lossypng.html