Hello, all. We have been providing renderings to our customers as .png file type, but lately they have complained about the file size being too large. Is there an advantage for .png over .jpg when it pertains to image quality? These renderings are for evaluation purposes only and will not be manipulated post-render. Thank you.
PNG generally store more color information and overall produce a sharper image than JPG. But realistically, if it was for the web, the difference may be negligible. Maybe even more so for JPG for social media as there is another layer of compression there as well.
Generally PNGs are better with graphics that have illustrations, vector art, logos, text or anything else that need sharp lines. If it is more photos of objects or people, JPG is generally good enough in most cases.
Short answer: Send them JPG. KeyShot has a slider to adjust how compressed a JPG is at render. Leaving it at 100% will result in the largest file size, the lower, the smaller the file and the lower the percieved quality of the image.
That said, I typically render JPGs at 80-90% and it’s plenty good enough for review.
PNGs are NOT compressed, so they’ll contain more info than your viewer need access to and honestly, it’s overkill. PNG is better for images that contain more data than can be percieved by the human eye.
Hope that helps.
Something a lot of people do for exporting for web is using a site like TinyJPG https://tinyjpg.com to compress images further and sometimes better quality than Photoshop and Keyshot’s simple sliders, tiny jpg also does PNGs.