Fireworks Help

[grandpafred]

This is similar in nature to zoran's thread 6028 regarding strange color changes.
I've just started using Fireworks 8, and if you have read some of my other posts you know I am VERY unskilled in the art of graphics.
Anyway, I created a little image of a star in FW... it has a transparent background. When saved to the web as a gif versus a png
they don't quite look the same. Since IE6 doesn't support png I need to use a gif (although I guess I could try a png hack) but I would like to know if there is a way to get the gif to look like the png?

You can see them both here
inourmidst.com/template_fred.htm

Thanks

[the_pm]

Unfortunately, you might be relegated to a PNG hack, unless there's some way you can get around needing for this to be transparent. I take it the image will be displayed on a non-solid background, and its placement will not be predictable?

If the answer to both those questions is "no," then you may be able to ditch transparency all together.

[grandpafred]

Unfortunately, you might be relegated to a PNG hack, unless there's some way you can get around needing for this to be transparent. I take it the image will be displayed on a non-solid background, and its placement will not be predictable?

If the answer to both those questions is "no," then you may be able to ditch transparency all together.

Well, I could try this without background transparency... making the background the color of the page...that might work, I'll see what happens when I try that.

[the_pm]

There you go :)

[grandpafred]

There you go :)

Nope... the 3 image on the page is a gif with no transparency yet it still looks bad

[the_pm]

.gif only supports up to 256 colors. It's really not going to get any better than that. Why not use .jpg here? If transparency isn't an issue, you could probably export that image at 90% quality and still keep it down to a very reasonable file size. The PNG version is simply too large.

[grandpafred]

.gif only supports up to 256 colors. It's really not going to get any better than that. Why not use .jpg here? If transparency isn't an issue, you could probably export that image at 90% quality and still keep it down to a very reasonable file size. The PNG version is simply too large.

Yeah, I just did one as a jpg and it looks much better and is the same size as the gif. Why is the png so large?

[grandpafred]

You can see the jpg version here inourmidst.com/index_fred.htm

[the_pm]

If the JPG looks better to you, this means that the lossiness that takes place when the image gets compressed is a pleasing effect for your eye (it tends to soften objects a little). The PNG version will be true to what you originally created, pixel-to-pixel, and the file size will be much larger. PNG-8 is a very nice format, as it does everything .gif does, but uses less data to do it. PNG-24/32 should rarely be used online, because it tends to get very large. If you zoom in on your jpg and your source file, you'll see some differences.