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Question

Photoshop saving PNGs too big! How can I make them smaller

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
September 14, 2018
7 replies
37262 views

I'm designing T shirts and saving them in Photoshop. The problem is, when I save them as a PNG, the file size is massive. This particular design only has 1 layer and it's 27MB! If I choose 'smallest file size' it's still about 25MB.

Can anyone help me reduce the file size? Would 'save for web' reduce the image quality too much?

This topic has been closed for replies.

barbara_a7746676

Community Expert

Have you tried saving as JPG? Depending on your image it may result in a much smaller file size. PNG is for images with areas of flat color that do not have shading or gradients. JPG works better for photographic images and gradients.

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

Legacy Save for Web is not suitable for print. I don't even use it for web images anymore.

What is your final PNG image being used for exactly?

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

Legacy Save for Web is not suitable for print.

Hi Nancy, some are of the opinion that PNG is not suitable for print, no matter the software used to create it. That being said many consumer and office related software apps take advantage of PNG transparency.

Until there is feature parity between the legacy save for web and the new export method the old tool is still useful for actions and scripting, slicing, animated GIF etc.

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

Is there some reason for resurrecting this topic from 2018 which was about artwork suitable for printing on T-shirts, not scripting???

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

barbara_a7746676

Community Expert

As Macpowel said, PNG does dot use compression.. You can reduce the size of a PNG by reducing the number of colors.

Per Berntsen

Community Expert

The PNG format uses lossless compression, which is less effective than jpg (lossy) compression.

macpawel

Participating Frequently

PNG iż format without Compression - your file is large this way. You can consider changing resolution or image size - PNG is popular for screen media - maybe your file is too large (dimensions, resolution).

But sometimes you can also consider to reduce bit depth and save your image as 8 bit image or JPEG file with maximum quality

pawel

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

Would 'save for web' reduce the image quality too much?

You can just test that yourself.

Does the file maybe have unusually voluminous metadata?

Inflated JPG File Size - Photoshop Document:Ancestors Metadata

F

Francesco Della Peruta

Community Expert

I'm agree with Mylenium. The final size of the file depends by many factors. To reduce the file size drastically you have to change file format, like .jpg. If your work is not a vector artwork, you can try to export it as .jpg

Mylenium

Legend

And what are the actual dimensions and resolution? what type of PNG do you choose? What does the content look like? For all intents and purposes, this could be perfectly normal for a reasonably large 300 DPI file or something and 25 MB overall realyl doesn't sound too bad for print stuff...

Mylenium

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