gamer_013

If you're going to post an image, say your cpu-z screenshot, on the internets what would you do?Ctrl+Alt+Prt Scrn, open paint, save as>yay.JPG

Now thats all fine and good for most people, but what about people who need to save bandwidth or are on dial-up? Use a file type called PNG (Portable Network Graphics)

Similar to the GIF, PNG is able to compress images without too much "noise" (such as a cpu-z screen shot: plain background and some text). Reducing the file size greatly without losing any quality (unlike JPG's).

"But we already use PNG's, go home n00b..." -Hey I'm not done yet.

Now that you have your nifty PNG image you can compress it further with a right click using PNG Crush.

PNG Crush further compresses images without losing quality be removing excess information about the image that isn't needed.

First, Download PNGCrush and extract to C:\ just to make it easy.

(This part is XP only I believe)

[See Image Below] Now open Control Panel and open up Folder Options. Click on the File Types tab and click on PNG and then Advanced. In the Edit File Type box that pops up click on New... In Action type in Crush and in Application used to perform action: type in This will use PNG Crush to compress it using brute force to compress it as small as possible and make the new compressed image named xyz2.png. Hit OK>OK>OK and you're set! Now right click on a PNG image and click Crush, then you will see the console window come up and you can watch it crunch numbers. When that's done you now have your image nice and small with perfect quality.



There ya go! This can be used on websites to save bandwidth or even give dial-upers a break.

See How Well it Works:

JPEG - 140kb (large and low quality)



PNG - 80kb (much smaller, lossless quality)



Crushed PNG - 54kb (even smaller, still no loss in quality)



There you have it folks, a better way to compress and use images. I've been using PNG's and PNG Crush for a while and thought it was about time to share this with the great people at overclock.net! Enjoy.

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HowTo Compress Images without Losing Quality

ivan0550

Nice +Rep for you!

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gamer_013

I'm glad I found out about this, I was on dial-up for 3 years and, well, at least this made it a little easier on me Also great for servers/bloggers to help them survive massive amounts of traffic.

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HowTo Compress Images without Losing Quality

JacKz5o

Thats just for that picture though.. if you use a picture full of color at that size saved with jpeg quality 10 in Photoshop its smaller and loseless as well.

gamer_013

True, for pictures full of color, png isn't the best choice, jpeg would be better. But for anything else that doesn't have too much color and design, like charts/graphs and screenshots of programs (like cpu-z, super pi, orthos, etc..) png would be perfect.

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HowTo Compress Images without Losing Quality