Tools for *lossy* PNG compression?

Question

I'm trying more and more to get by sans PhotoShop for my personal/freelance work. I do primarily web work these days and don't do enough side gigs to justify keeping up with the Creative Suite beast. Alas, that does bring to the table some limitations. On OSX I've been enjoying Pixelmator but it has woefully inadequate PNG export support. I can dump it out as a PNG then use one of the many great PNG optimizers like PNGCrusher and can reduce the size fairly well. Alas, all of the PNG optimizing tools I've found are purely lossless. Is anyone familiar with a tool (other than PhotoShop) that would offer up some lossy PNG compression options as well like reducing the color pallet, converting 32bit to 24 or 8bit, etc? Addendum: I'm open to OSX or Windows software. I could even fire up Ubuntu if I had to, I suppose...

Answer 1

For web graphics, I would first ask whether the image truly needs to remain a PNG. If transparency is required, tools such as pngquant can reduce color palettes and significantly shrink file sizes with minimal visible quality loss. If transparency is not needed, exporting as JPEG, WebP, or AVIF will often produce much smaller files. The best choice depends on the content of the image and where it will be displayed.