Could you use a little help making sure you’re choosing the right PNG options? They look so confusing . . . but really, they’re not.

Mystery Box Series
In my Mystery Box series, we’ll take a look at sorting through all the words and options of some of Adobe’s most common warning dialog boxes to simplify them and get you back to doing what you do best … telling your stories.

PNG Options
This is not really a “warning” dialog box, but it is something that pops up in your way when trying to save a file as a PNG. And truth be told, it’s confusing to most people. So let me dispel the mystery.

We’ll talk about two things: compression and interlacing.

PNG Compression — The Semi-Geeky Details

• Compression in Photoshop is when the app smooshes your file so that it takes up less room on your hard drive.
  Think about how you might deflate a beach ball to make it smaller when storing it. Deflating it does not hurt it. If you blow it up again to use it, it will look and act exactly the same.
• Does compression hurt my PNG file? NO
  PNG files use “lossless compression,” meaning no parts of your file are altered, they are just smooshed together.
• Why would I WANT to compress my PNG file?
  PNG files can result in very large file sizes. If you are concerned about storage on your hard drive or cloud account, then you would want to get into the habit of using the most compression available to you. Remember, compression does not hurt a PNG file.
• Why would I NOT WANT to compress my PNG file?
  PNG files can be so large that (1) the compression takes a very long time, or (2) your computer may not be able to accommodate the temporary memory it takes to perform the compression. So in this case, choosing less or no compression may be your best choice.

Here’s an image representing what happens with compression in both Photoshop Elements and Adobe Photoshop. For illustration, I’m using a fancy clipping mask by KimB Designs.

PNG Interlacing — The Semi-Geeky Details

• An interlaced PNG is comparable to a progressive JPG. In normal-person talk, remember when you would load a website and the images on the site would start off fuzzy and progressively become clear as they load? That’s interlacing.
• Interlacing causes an image to load slowly so that you’re not looking at a blank screen while an image loads. This mostly affects websites and is not really needed anymore due to better internet worldwide.
• Interlacing typically will make the file size of an image larger.

A Digital Scrapbooker’s Look at PNG Compression & Interlacing

Considering the data shown in the image above, I have different advice depending on what software you use. Remember, either of the options will not hurt your PNG file.

Photoshop Elements Users:  YIKES! Did you see the difference in Final File Size depending on the options you choose? Because of this, PSE users should always set the Compression to Smallest in the PNG Options dialog box. Set the Internlace to None.

Adobe Photoshop Users: The data shows that there is not much difference when working with an average digital scrapbooking file. So, your choice does not really matter. I also would not bother messing with Interlacing unless you have a reason to.

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Author: Jen White | Contact Us
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