Animating PNG files

While this article is directed towards cartoonists and online comic makers, there are still many valuable tips for anyone who would like to use animated PNG on their web sites.

“PNG’s strengths are well suited for online cartoons:

• It can handle truecolor graphics (millions of different colors), while GIF can only display 256 different colors. Therefore PNG comics can look much more vivid than GIF comics.
• PNG compression is lossless, which means that unlike JPEGs, there is no degradation of image quality when you save a cartoon. You won’t see the color “halos” or blotches that mar many JPEG cartoons.
• PNG is an Open Source image format, so you can use it however you want. GIF, on the other hand, uses a patented compression scheme which makes anyone using it subject to legal restrictions. Unisys, the company that owns this patent, can potentially force any GIF-using cartoonist to pay royalties. For a good rant on why cartoonists should use PNG instead of GIF, you can read an essay by Christopher B. Wright, creator of the Help Desk comic. An informative and political look at the issues can also be found at the Burn All GIFs website.
• PNG images compress more efficiently than GIFs. The smaller file size you can achieve with PNG may be the most important reason to switch to this format. Nothing will make you lose readers like having strips that take too long to download. There are several ways to maximize this efficiency, which we’ll examine during most of this article.

In short, PNG combines (and improves upon) the best qualities of GIF and JPEG, and can effectively replace GIFs on the Web. So why don’t people use it more often? Maybe because of the misconception that modern Web browsers don’t support PNG. In fact, all major browsers can currently view PNG. If your readers use IE 4.0 or Netscape 4.04 or greater, they shouldn’t have any problems. I’ve also tested PNG images with several lesser used browsers, such as Opera, Amaya, and Mosaic, and they all work fine.

But enough of why you should use PNG- Here are some tips on how to use it correctly.”

Read all of the tips for creating animations and cartoons with .PNG image formats at PNG Tips for Cartoonists