Analysis of Fireworks PNG Support

I should note a few caveats about the implementation of indexed-color images and transparency in Fireworks 1.0. For example, the dither checkbox seems to have very little effect in any of the palette examples, and no effect at all on the alpha channel in RGBA images; in fact, the export ``wizard'' explicitly notes this and actually recommends against its use. And the palette-size pull-down seems to have been borrowed from the GIF user interface--it allows only power-of-two palette sizes (e.g., 64, 128, 256) even though PNG's palette chunk can have any number of entries from 1 to 256. The final jump is particularly abrupt; it may happen that 160 colors is the perfect trade-off between quality and image size, but such an image would have to be saved with either 128 or 256 colors.

With regard to transparency, the placement of transparent entries in the Export window's palette view is directly reflected in the PNG file's palette, whether Alpha Channel or Index Color is selected. This is regrettable, since the transparent colors are scattered all over the palette in the alpha case. The single-color case is even worse--the transparent color is the very last entry in the palette. As noted earlier, the preferred approach is to put all of the transparent entries at the beginning of the palette so that the redundant information about opaque colors can be eliminated from the transparency chunk. For a photographic image saved in palette format with single-color transparency, the cost is 127 or 255 bytes of wasted space.

PNG also supports a single-color (or single-shade), ``cheap'' transparency mode that works with truecolor and grayscale images and avoids the need for a full alpha channel, but there is no way to invoke this feature in Fireworks. The lack of any grayscale support other than palette-based means that a gray image with an alpha channel must be saved either as RGBA, doubling its size, or as an indexed image with transparent palette entries, generally with some data loss. (The loss comes about because there are only 256 possible gray+alpha combinations in palette mode, whereas a full gray+alpha image supports up to 65,536 combinations.) There is also no support for a PNG background-color chunk.

Images that already have transparency are preserved quite well (recall that everything is stored internally as 32-bit RGBA), and Fireworks provides quite a number of options beyond what described earlier for adding or modifying transparency. One in particular that could be used for unsharp masking and other special effects is invoked via the Xtras menu. With the background image selected, choose Other → Convert to Alpha, which first converts the image to grayscale and then to an alpha mask. The lightest parts of the image become the most transparent, while the black parts remain opaque.

Fireworks's compression is reasonably good. Even though there are no user options to adjust the compression level, the default level is a good trade-off between speed and size. Truecolor images tend to be compressed within a few percent of the best possible size, while indexed-color images may see upward of 15% improvement when run through an optimization tool such as pngcrush (discussed in Chapter 5, "Applications: Image Converters").

Fireworks also does a good job preserving PNG text annotations, albeit with a quirk: it removes all of the line breaks (``newlines''), for some reason. (Oddly enough, GIF and JPEG comments are not preserved.) The program adds its own Software text chunk; as one might expect, any incoming image that already includes such a chunk will find it replaced. This is a minor breach of PNG etiquette, but one that helps keep tiny image files from getting noticeably bigger because of text comments.

Fireworks 1.0 also adds a Creation Time text chunk to most images it exports. This is not really a problem, per se; what is unusual is that the chunk's contents are invariably ``Thu, May 7, 1998''--a date that has nothing to do with any of the images or even with the release of Fireworks 1.0. See also Chapter 11, "PNG Options and Extensions" for a discussion of why ``creation time'' is a fuzzy concept. Version 2.0 was to have corrected this, replacing the Creation Time text chunk with PNG's officially defined timestamp chunk, tIME, but I did not have a chance to verify that. The tIME chunk indicates the time of last modification, which is a more precisely defined concept and one that is appropriate for an image editor.

As noted earlier, the ability to save interlaced PNG images will first be implemented as a global preference setting. As of January 1999, the plan was for this to require editing version 2.0's preferences file. Under Windows, this file is called Fireworks Preferences.txt and is in the Fireworks installation directory (C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Fireworks, by default); on the Macintosh, it is called Fireworks Preferences and is found in the System Folder:Preferences folder. Open the file in any text editor and find the line:

(ExportPngWithAdam7Interlacing) (false)

Change this to the following to make all exported images interlaced:

(ExportPngWithAdam7Interlacing) (true)

This change will take effect only after Fireworks 2.0 is restarted. Fortunately, later releases are expected to have a normal checkbox option.

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Analysis of Fireworks PNG Support I should note a few caveats about the implementation of indexed-color images and transparency in Fireworks 1.0. For example, the dither checkbox seems to have very little effect in any of the palette examples, and no effect at all on the alpha channel in RGBA images; in fact, the export ``wizard'' explicitly notes this and actually recommends against its use. And the palette-size pull-down seems to have been borrowed from the GIF user interface--it allows only power-of-two palette sizes (e.g., 64, 128, 256) even though PNG's palette chunk can have any number of entries from 1 to 256. The final jump is particularly abrupt; it may happen that 160 colors is the perfect trade-off between quality and image size, but such an image would have to be saved with either 128 or 256 colors. With regard to transparency, the placement of transparent entries in the Export window's palette view is directly reflected in the PNG file's palette, whether Alpha Channel or Index Color is selected. This is regrettable, since the transparent colors are scattered all over the palette in the alpha case. The single-color case is even worse--the transparent color is the very last entry in the palette. As noted earlier, the preferred approach is to put all of the transparent entries at the beginning of the palette so that the redundant information about opaque colors can be eliminated from the transparency chunk. For a photographic image saved in palette format with single-color transparency, the cost is 127 or 255 bytes of wasted space. PNG also supports a single-color (or single-shade), ``cheap'' transparency mode that works with truecolor and grayscale images and avoids the need for a full alpha channel, but there is no way to invoke this feature in Fireworks. The lack of any grayscale support other than palette-based means that a gray image with an alpha channel must be saved either as RGBA, doubling its size, or as an indexed image with transparent palette entries, generally with some data loss. (The loss comes about because there are only 256 possible gray+alpha combinations in palette mode, whereas a full gray+alpha image supports up to 65,536 combinations.) There is also no support for a PNG background-color chunk. Images that already have transparency are preserved quite well (recall that everything is stored internally as 32-bit RGBA), and Fireworks provides quite a number of options beyond what described earlier for adding or modifying transparency. One in particular that could be used for unsharp masking and other special effects is invoked via the Xtras menu. With the background image selected, choose Other → Convert to Alpha, which first converts the image to grayscale and then to an alpha mask. The lightest parts of the image become the most transparent, while the black parts remain opaque. Fireworks's compression is reasonably good. Even though there are no user options to adjust the compression level, the default level is a good trade-off between speed and size. Truecolor images tend to be compressed within a few percent of the best possible size, while indexed-color images may see upward of 15% improvement when run through an optimization tool such as pngcrush (discussed in Chapter 5, "Applications: Image Converters"). Fireworks also does a good job preserving PNG text annotations, albeit with a quirk: it removes all of the line breaks (``newlines''), for some reason. (Oddly enough, GIF and JPEG comments are not preserved.) The program adds its own Software text chunk; as one might expect, any incoming image that already includes such a chunk will find it replaced. This is a minor breach of PNG etiquette, but one that helps keep tiny image files from getting noticeably bigger because of text comments. Fireworks 1.0 also adds a Creation Time text chunk to most images it exports. This is not really a problem, per se; what is unusual is that the chunk's contents are invariably ``Thu, May 7, 1998''--a date that has nothing to do with any of the images or even with the release of Fireworks 1.0. See also Chapter 11, "PNG Options and Extensions" for a discussion of why ``creation time'' is a fuzzy concept. Version 2.0 was to have corrected this, replacing the Creation Time text chunk with PNG's officially defined timestamp chunk, tIME, but I did not have a chance to verify that. The tIME chunk indicates the time of last modification, which is a more precisely defined concept and one that is appropriate for an image editor. As noted earlier, the ability to save interlaced PNG images will first be implemented as a global preference setting. As of January 1999, the plan was for this to require editing version 2.0's preferences file. Under Windows, this file is called Fireworks Preferences.txt and is in the Fireworks installation directory (C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Fireworks, by default); on the Macintosh, it is called Fireworks Preferences and is found in the System Folder:Preferences folder. Open the file in any text editor and find the line: (ExportPngWithAdam7Interlacing) (false) Change this to the following to make all exported images interlaced: (ExportPngWithAdam7Interlacing) (true) This change will take effect only after Fireworks 2.0 is restarted. Fortunately, later releases are expected to have a normal checkbox option.
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