Talk:PNGOUT
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[edit] Free?
Um, since when is commercial software with a trial considered "free"? Perhaps Adobe Flash is free as well, if that's the case... Esn 01:28, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
- Ok, seems that I misread the links a bit. But perhaps something should be added to this article about the commercial, "professional" version? Esn 01:30, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Ports
Since there are ports to Linux and Mac OS X, shouldn't we report them in the infobox? --Ysangkok 19:16, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
- I doubt it. They're not made by Ken Silverman nor are they official. Information about them will be a nice addition in the article itself though. Cristan 19:26, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Colourspace reductions
"PNGOUT also performs automatic bit depth, color and palette reduction where appropriate." Is this true? My 20050422 Linux version certainly doesn't; I always preprocess my PNGs with pngrewrite. If pngout does do this now, can you indicate when this functionality was added? Is it documented somewhere? The tutorial at http://advsys.net/ken/util/pngout.htm still says "It won't reduce the number of colors in images or convert the colors to grayscale unless all the colors correspond to PNG grayscale values already." Is it out of date? – gpvos (talk) 10:32, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
- A lot has happened to PNGOUT since 2005. PNGOUTWin was released early 2006 with many new features, some of which have filtered through to PNGOUT, and both programs have been worked on a lot since then. I think the colour reduction feature was added last October. Unfortunately, I don't think the tutorial has been updated since PNGOUTWin was released.
In any case, try getting a more recent Linux port from here. If you run it without parameters, it will tell you about the newer command line options. It doesn't explicitly mention the addition of colour reduction, but does say you can disable it with '/ks'.
You shouldn't need to preprocess images with pngrewrite any more. And, if you omit the pngrewrite step, then you won't have to manually compare the input and output files to check for a size decrease; by default, PNGOUT won't write a larger file, but just retain the input file. CountingPine 17:02, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
- Additional note: Looking again at the tutorial text, "It won't reduce the number of colours in images". PNGOUT can reduce the color type, and it can remove unused colours from a palette. But what it means, is that it won't change the color values of the pixels in the image. For example, if an image uses more than 256 colours, it won't remove colours (thereby changing the image) to shoehorn it into a palette. CountingPine 22:50, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
- In fact your quote just said this program does it. "It won't reduce the number of colors ... UNLESS ...", so in some situations, it does. Your quote simply implies it won't remove any of the visible colors, but others could be removed. Cristan 11:22, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
An explanation to clarify the above notes: PNGOUT will never reduce the number of actual, visible unique colors. PNGOUT never makes changes to the final form of the displayed image. What it will do, if there are 256 or fewer unique colors in the visible image, is reduce the number of palette (color) entries in the PNG file. For example, if there are only 50 unique colors in the image, the new PNG file will have only a 50-color palette with no wasted entries, instead of a 256-color palette with 206 wasted entries. In most cases where this can be done, it results in a major reduction in file size to store exactly the same image. In addition, if every "color" is just a shade of black/grey/white (i.e., red, green, and blue are exactly equal for each palette entry), PNGOUT can make the PNG a greyscale image (monochrome with only white, no color tint) instead of a color image. Note that all these changes affect only file efficiency and, as PNGOUT says, never reduce the colors or make any other changes to the visible image itself, only to how it's stored. --Closeapple (talk) 23:19, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Other programs related to PNGOUT worth mentioning
I think freeware programs like PNGGauntlet (a GUI for PNGOUT) - http://brh.numbera.com/software/pnggauntlet/ and Irfanview's PNGOUT plugin - http://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm should also be mentioned in the article. Very useful as the only GUI for PNGOUT mentioned in this article is not freeware. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.217.75.211 (talk) 08:39, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
- Sounds like a good idea. Be bold, go for it! By the way, when you use Talk pages, you should "sign" your posts by typing "~~~~" at the end of them. CountingPine (talk) 18:52, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
