Export! Do Not Save!

All too often I see images people have either made or edited in photoshop in .png format. Most of the time, those files are way bigger than need be.

When using Photoshop, I advise you to Export your image instead of saving it. This will shave a good amount off of the end file size.

In this example, I'll use my avatar for simplicity.
This copy of my is a simple 85px/85px image, savedas .png for transparency and color.




But, because it was saved and not exported, it's size it larger than need be(we can't all have super fast internet)



Now if I export the image instead of saving it, it produces an almost identical image



But you'll notice, I shaved off over 30KB in its filesize.



Imagine if the image had even bigger dimensions. Saving it as a .png would be crazy big.

Idk why I made this post, it's kinda like "The More You Know" but for photoshop? Might make more, idk.


Thanks for reading.

Man all I ever do is a simple Ctrl + Shift + S then pick .png ?. Honestly wish I would of knew this before, but I always seem to be in some sort of weird time limit ??
Anyway thanks, should help with different internet speeds and such!

I never knew there was such a difference, why does it make such a difference by the way ?

11-04-2019, 04:24 PM

Mattioo Wrote: I never knew there was such a difference, why does it make such a difference by the way ?

Depends on your settings/information in the image. Adding transparency adds another channel to the image.
Save As saves without a ICC profile, but with XMP information and Alpha channel. That's why it produce the largest file size, but may not be the optimal solution as the colors with PNG will be random as it would be up to the OS and browser to interpret.

Doing Save for Web, alternatively Export As, allow you to set if you want transparency. If you save with transparency and no profile, like Save As would, you would get an image that is identical in size, and no XMP information.

The best bet, size and quality wise, would be Save For Web,not Export or Save As, remove Transparency channel, convert to sRGB, include ICC profile and and set "Metadata" to "none".

Sometimes, it is just easier to save, as it has a simple shortcut. But for quality, I do agree with you to export over saving.

That only works on very small image. Just run your files thru tinypng website.


its a simple screenshot, that way it's so blurry xd. Someone know how to take screenshot with better quality? xd

25-03-2019, 04:13 PM

PapaSchwabs Wrote: All too often I see images people have either made or edited in photoshop in .png format. Most of the time, those files are way bigger than need be.

When using Photoshop, I advise you to Export your image instead of saving it. This will shave a good amount off of the end file size.

In this example, I'll use my avatar for simplicity.
This copy of my is a simple 85px/85px image, savedas .png for transparency and color.




But, because it was saved and not exported, it's size it larger than need be(we can't all have super fast internet)



Now if I export the image instead of saving it, it produces an almost identical image



But you'll notice, I shaved off over 30KB in its filesize.



Imagine if the image had even bigger dimensions. Saving it as a .png would be crazy big.

Idk why I made this post, it's kinda like "The More You Know" but for photoshop? Might make more, idk.


Thanks for reading.

This explains why my external drive was filled when i transferred some family photos.

Oh I found this pretty interesting since I'm actually taking the multimedia engineering course this semester. It talks about graphical data compression, too.
But I'm not actually that used with photoshop and any bitmap manipulation software, I'm still not really understanding what's the most optimal solution to each cases.
But at least, i can say that saving file in vector format:
- .ai for adobe illustrator
- .cdr for coreldraw
- .svg for general purpose and inkscape
- .eps, a kind of level-up of svg
Would probably take a much smaller size (in condition that you dont embed or link any bitmap element in it's file)