Running a lossless PNG pass after palette reduction saves more than running it first

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A test of 12 Wikimedia Commons PNGs across four image classes compared orderings of pngquant and oxipng in an asset pipeline. Running pngquant first and oxipng second gave substantially smaller files than the reverse order, where oxipng's earlier work was discarded by pngquant's rewrite. Oxipng added roughly 1.6 to 4.0 percentage points of savings on top of pngquant, costing under two seconds per class. The author also tested zopflipng in a quick mode, which added little beyond pngquant and took far longer. The sample was small, with three files per class, so the findings are indicative rather than conclusive.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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