PNG Product Images?
A question to the community at large. I’ve been asked to give an opinion on the PNG file format. More specifically, if it would be worth it to include a PNG version of products in the process of creating web photo assets. Note that I’m referring to a large number of product images (in the hundreds of thousands), so we’re talking about a fundamental shift and yet another step in what can be a time-consuming process.
I’m familar with most of the pros/ cons of PNG and have utilized them for their benefits in gradients and tackled the whole IE transparency issue. The question is, would you bother with PNG?
6 Comments
I’m currently working on an e-commerce site and I think we’ll be using mostly PNG, but it’s also going to have a bunch of flash involved. I’m interested in hear how other people feel about it.
For any image over 400×400 with a real-world color palette, I can’t understand why anything other than a high-quality (85% or greater) JPG would be used.
In a GIF vs PNG, PNG would be the reasonable choice for most cases. But for product images, using PNG introduces a lot of scary color oddities where the product may have different hues depending on OS/browser. For the most part, JPGs don’t have this issue (unless you’re dealing with automated color correction from CMYK to RGB). Since product images don’t have luxury that, for instance, a logo would, in terms of being slightly off color, I wouldn’t even remotely consider PNGs for this case.
Is there a specific feature in the PNG format that you would benefit from by making all of your product shots PNG files?
If not, odds are you can get smaller files by just sticking with JPGs.
I am sorry to say buy IE6 still demands transparency free images. Product shots are top priority if I was a ecommerce and lots of photosets I would say no to PNG!
I use PNGs only for inclusion in Office documents, as they seem to resize nicer… such that even when they’re small, the text is often legible.
On a side note… Axure generates all its images as PNGs. No idea why.
Great comments, all… this provides a lot of good insight