Patrick W. Barnes wrote:
Since JPEG is lossy and PNG is not, JPEG has a bit of an advantage in reducing image sizes. As was already pointed out, reducing bit depth helps. If you haven't already, give optipng a try. It's in our repositories. :-)
Yeh, I understand that PNG is not lossy and JPEG isn't. I just thought there might be some trickery like saving a lossy JPEG out as a PNG? I used to use Macromedia Fireworks back in the day and it was a lot better at compressing PNGs pretty small without too poor a quality hit but they do crazy stuff with PNGs too like adding in vector support.
I will definitely give optipng a try but I don't have much hope of getting it down to 7k like in the jpg. :( I did indeed reduce the bit depth as well.
~m