StarDestroyer.Net BBS

My Question is very simple: What the hell is a .png file, and what does it do?

Secondly, is there any way to preserve photoshop layers without stuffing my harddrive full of 5 megabyte-per-panel abominations?

The very first result on Google has a whole shitton of information on PNG.

PNG files are just image files, they aren't as compressable as JPGs as far as I'm aware but they do have the nifty feature of allowing transparency to be saved. I'm using one for my sig picture now. Wikipedia has more techincal information if you really want here.

As for compressing Photoshop layers, I've never heard of a way to do it. Count yourself lucky, one of the .PSD textures I'm working on at the moment weighs in at over a hundred megabytes.

Ah... it doesn't seem to preserve layers, but it appears better than .jpeg and is about as small. Thank you. I guess I'll just have to rely on getting text right the first time.

Base Delta Zero wrote:My Question is very simple: What the hell is a .png file, and what does it do?

<- My avatar would be an example. Its main advantages over JPG is that allows transparancies and over GIF that it allows alpha blended transparancies (it means that something can be anywhere from 0% to 100% transparent, instead of only being either transparent or not) and 24 bit (32 with 8 bits for transparency) color (as opposed to 256 colors that GIF supports)

Secondly, is there any way to preserve photoshop layers without stuffing my harddrive full of 5 megabyte-per-panel abominations?

Well, no. PSD is a format intended to facilitate further work and is not intended to be the final format. As such, it is a lossless format which means it doesn't lose any information about the picture (as opposed to JPG and GIF) which makes compression only available with lossless algorithms (think ZIP files), instead of lossy compresion (information "not visible to the human eye" - which often isn't really true - is lost in order to make the picture more uniform and, as such, easier to compress) employed JPG to get their size down.

PNG is not really better than JPEG, it's just different.