PNG without ZLib

If you need to send PNG images in a compressed archive, here's a tip.

PNG's are internally compressed with Zlib. When you run another compressor (such as Oodle) on an already-compressed file like PNG, it won't be able to do much with it. It might get a few bytes out of the headers, but typically the space-speed tradeoff decision in Oodle will not think that gain is worth bothering with, so the PNG will just be sent uncompressed.

There are a few reasons why you might want to use an Oodle compressor rather than the Zlib inside PNG. One is to reduce size; some of the Oodle compressors can make the files smaller than Zlib can. Another is for speed, if you use Kraken or Mermaid the decoder is much faster than the Zlib decompression in PNG.

Now obviously if you want the smallest possible lossless image, you should use an image-specific codec like webp-ll , but we will assume here that that isn't an option.

You could of course just decode the PNG to BMP or TGA or some kind of simple sample format, but that is not desirable. For one thing it changes the format, and your end usage loader might be expecting PNG. Your PNG's might be using PNG-specific features like borders or transparency or whatever that is hard to translate to other formats.

But another is that we want the PNG to keep doing its filtering. Filtered image samples from PNG will usually be more compressible by the back-end compressor than the raw samples in a BMP.

The easy way to do this all is just to take an existing PNG and set its ZLib compression level to 0 (just store). You keep all the PNG headers, and you still get the pixel filtering. But the samples are now uncompressed, so the back-end compressor (Oodle or whatever) gets to work on them instead of passing through already-ZLibbed data.

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pngcp

pngcp is a utility from the official libpng distribution. It reads & writes a png and can change some options.

Usage for what we want is :

pngcp --level=0 --text-level=0 from.png to.png

I have made a Win32 build with static libs of pngcp for your convenience :

pngcp.zip

I also added a --help option ; run "pngcp --help". The official pngcp seems to have no help or readme at all that explains usage.

I *think* that pngcp preserves headers & options & pixel formats BUT I'M NOT SURE, it's not my code, YMMV, don't go fuck up your pngs without testing it. If it doesn't work - hey you can get pngcp from the official distro and fix it.

I used libpng 1624. The vc7.1 project in libpng worked fine for me. pngcp needed a little bit of de-unixification to build in VC but it was straightforward. You need zlib ; I used 1.2.8 and it worked fine; you need to make a dir named "zlib" at the same level as libpng. I did "mklink /j zlib zlib-1.2.8".

* CAVEAT : this isn't really the way I'd like to do this. pngcp loads the PNG and then saves it out again, which introduces the possibility of losing metadata that was stuffed in the file or just screwing it up somehow. I'd much rather do this conversion without ever actually loading it as an image. That is, take the PNG file as just a binary blob, find the zlib streams and unpack them, store them with a level 0 header, and pass through the PNG headers totally untouched. That would be a much more robust way to ensure you don't lose anything.

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cbpngz0

cbpngz0 usage :

cbpngz0 from to

cbpngz0 uses the cblib loaders, so it can load bmp,tga,png,jpeg and so on. It writes a PNG at zlib level 0. Unlike pngcp, cbpngz0 does NOT support lots of weird formats; it only writes 8-bit gray, 24-bit RGB, and 32-bit RGBA. This is not a general purpose PNG zlib level changer!! Nevertheless I find it useful because of the wider range of formats it can load.

cbpngz0.zip

cbpngz0 is an x64 exe and uses the DLLs included.

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Some sample results.

I take an original PNG, then try compressing it with Oodle two ways. First, convert it to a BMP and compress the BMP. Second, convert to a Zlib level 0 PNG (the "_z0.png") and then compress with Oodle. The differene between the two is that the _z0.png gets the PNG filters, and of course stays a PNG if that's what your loader expects. If you give the original PNG to Oodle, it passes it through uncompressed.

porsche640.png             529,821

porsche640.bmp             921,654

porsche640.bmp.ooz         711,273

porsche640_z0.png.ooz      508,091

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blinds.png                 328,754

blinds.bmp               1,028,826

blinds.bmp.ooz             193,130

blinds_z0.png.ooz          195,558

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xxx.png                    420,149

xxx.bmp                    915,054

xxx.bmp.ooz                521,861

xxx_z0.png.ooz             409,311

The ooz files are made with Oodle LZNA -z6 (level Optimal2).

You can see there are some big gains possible with replacing Zlib (on "blinds"). On normal photographic continuous tone images Zlib does okay so the gains are small. On those images, compressing the BMP without filters is very bad.

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Another small note : if your end usage PNG loader supports the optional MNG format LOCO color transform, that usually helps compression.

ADD : Chris Maiwald points out that he gets better PNG filter choice by using "Z_FIXED" (which is the zlib option for fixed huffman tables instead of per-file huffman). A bit weird, but perhaps it biases the filter choice to be more consistent?

I wonder if choosing a single PNG filter for the whole image would be better than letting PNG do its per-row thing? (to try to make the post-filter residuals more consistent for the back end modeling stage). For max compression you would use something like a png optimizer that tried various filter strategies, but instead of rating them using zlib, rate with the back-end of your choice.