Converting PNG32 file to PNG8 without losing alpha channel

Question

I'm using Linux and have no access to any of Adobe's 'fancy' programs.

I'm trying to convert an existing PNG32 image with alpha channel to PNG8. I have tried the following methods:

• convert original.png PNG8:new.png - Horribly distorts the image and preserving only binary alpha (Not Indexed alpha)
• GIMP - Fails as well, but produces better quality (good color quantizer) than ImageMagick.
• pngcrush -rem alla -reduce -brute original.png new.png - Made the image smaller but didn't take quantization into account (Image has less than 256 colors), so output was still PNG32.

What else can I try?

Answer 1

This PHP script does the trick with libgd:

<?PHP

if(!isset($argv[1]) || !is_readable($argv[1])) {
    echo "Creates an 8-bit PNG from a 32-bit PNG\n\n";
    echo "Usage:\n";
    echo "\t" . $argv[0] . " input.png > output.png\n";
    echo "\t" . $argv[0] . " input.png output.png\n";
    die();
}

$inFile = $argv[1];
$outFile = $argv[2] or STDOUT;

$inImage = imagecreatefrompng($inFile);
$outImage = imagecreate(imagesx($inImage), imagesy($inImage));

imagecopy($outImage, $inImage, 0, 0, 0, 0, imagesx($inImage), imagesy($inImage));

imagepng($outImage, $outFile);

Dump that into a file and run it as:

php convert.php input.png output.png

Answer 2

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but this recently bit me on a web project I'm working on.

I used pngnq for batch conversion and my PNG8 have never looked better. In fact, with the highest sampling rate (-s 1) the results are nearly indistinguishable from a full PNG32.

Answer 3

Your distro may include pngquant. If you can't find it with yum / apt-get, go to the web site. I think this is your best bet.

If you're having issues with pngquant, you can try pngout, but it's a long shot. I've heard it does a good job retaining the alpha channel, but can be slow. Possibly the slowness people experience is because the default 'strategy' is 'Extreme' which the author admits is slow.

It's a windows program, but there are linux ports (supposedly), but the link on the pngout authors page is out of date. The linux port maintainer, JonoF, maintains a page here now.

I have to admit to not ever having used it. Good luck!

Answer 4

Use pngquant, but make sure you have version later than 1.6. The latest version has very good quantizer that will beat PHP's libGD by far, in every case.

Debian wheezy still contains a 13-year-old version that has low quality output. There's a good pngquant package for Debian experimental, and most other Linux distros.

If your distro has only outdated pngquant, then use pngnq instead.