If you’ve been around web design for any length of time you know about PNG transparency issues with Internet Explorer 6. PNG looks great in nearly every browser except IE6, and with plenty of folks still using IE6 despite its limitations, it’s a good idea to support these users as best as possible. Usually this means using Javascript hacks to exploit some proprietary features of IE6 to enable PNG transparency. But here is a an interesting screencast from Brenelz’s Web Solutions which looks pretty interesting. It’s basically a way of creating a PNG32 in Photoshop, then re-opening it in Fireworks and saving it as a PNG8 with alpha-transparency. The results are pretty impressive and the image file size is dramatically lower.
Edited: I tried this today using a PNG-32 which was previously saved in PhotoShop. The file was 16kb. The PNG-8 alpha transparency file was 4kb. 25% of the original size! In Firefox the image seemed just as good. It wasn’t as smooth as the PNG-32 given that PNG-8 has only a fraction of the color palette. The file in IE6 looked different, but was perfectly acceptable. It beat the usual method of Javascript hacks and conditional statements.
Thanks for the mention!