The PNG Guide is an eBook based on Greg Roelofs' book, originally published by O'Reilly.



PNG Feature Support in Fireworks

Fireworks 1.0 supports a good range of PNG features and image types, and it truly shines in its handling of transparency--indeed, its native internal format is 32-bit RGBA (truecolor with a full 8-bit alpha channel) for all images, and it can save this format, too. In addition, ordinary single-color (GIF-like) transparency is supported in both palette-based and RGB image types, and PNG's unique ``RGBA palette'' mode is also supported. Nor is this support limited to recognizing when an image contains 256 or fewer color-transparency combinations; with a suitable choice of export options, Fireworks can (within limits) quantize and optionally dither even a truecolor image with a nontrivial alpha channel to an 8-bit RGBA-palette image.

There are a couple of notable omissions from Fireworks's list of PNG features, however. The most painful is the lack of support for gamma and color correction; images created by the application will vary in appearance between different display systems just as much as any old-style GIF or JPEG image would, appearing too bright and washed out on Macintosh, SGI, and NeXT systems or too dark on just about everything else. Version 1.0 also cannot write interlaced PNGs, even though it provides a seemingly valid checkbox option for some PNG output types. Version 2.0 addresses this problem, but only in a very limited way: the original plans were to include a ``hidden'' preference that can be changed so that all exported PNG images are interlaced (instead of none of them).[11]

[11] A tight release schedule was the main reason for the lack of a real fix in version 2.0; Macromedia engineers were fully aware of the deficiencies in the workaround and are expected to address them in the next release.

As one would expect of a graphics application targeted at the Web, Fireworks doesn't preserve 16-bit samples, although it will read 16-bit PNG images (for example, from a medical scan) and convert the samples to 8 bits. Slightly more surprising is its lack of support for true grayscale PNGs; Fireworks saves these as palette-based files, with a palette composed entirely of grayscale entries. This is a perfectly valid type of PNG file, but the required palette adds up to 780 bytes of unnecessary overhead, a distinct liability for icons and other tiny images. On the other hand, a palette-based grayscale image with transparency can include a colored palette entry to be used as the background color, something that PNG does not support for true grayscale files.

In addition to supporting PNG as an output format, Fireworks actually uses PNG as its native file format for day-to-day intermediate saves. This is possible thanks to PNG's extensible ``chunk-based'' design, which allows programs to incorporate application-specific data in a well-defined way. Macromedia has embraced this capability, defining at least four custom chunk types that hold various things pertinent to the editor. Unfortunately, one of them (pRVW) violates the PNG naming rules by claiming to be an officially registered, public chunk type, but this was an oversight and should be fixed in version 2.0.

Although it is entirely possible to use the intermediate Fireworks PNG files in other applications, including on the Web (in fact, one of the ``frequently asked questions'' on the Fireworks web site specifically mentions Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Photoshop), they are not really appropriate for such usage. One reason is that the native PNG format reflects Fireworks's internal storage format, which, as mentioned earlier, is 32-bit RGBA. Even if the image contains only two colors and no transparency, it is saved as a 32-bit PNG file. That certainly doesn't help the old compression ratio any, but the potential for expansion due to the image depth is often overshadowed by that due to the custom chunks, several of which are huge.[12] Thanks to these chunks (which are meaningless to any application but Fireworks), the intermediate PNG files can easily be larger than a completely uncompressed RGBA image would be.

[12] In a 590k tutorial image from Macromedia's web site, 230k is due to image data; 360k is due to custom chunks.

Of course, Macromedia never intended for users to treat the native Fireworks PNG files as the final output format. The fully editable ``fat'' PNGs are produced by the Save menu option; to make final, highly compressed PNGs for web usage, use the Export option. While this might seem like an odd approach to someone unfamiliar with modern image editors, its only real difference from that of applications like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro is the fact that the intermediate format is widely readable even by low-end apps and browsers (which is not the case for Photoshop's native .psd format or Paint Shop Pro's .psp format). For an in-house network with high-speed links--for example, in a design studio--this allows images to be easily browsable over the intranet, yet retain all of their object-level editing attributes.




Last Update: 2010-Nov-26