MicrostockGroup

I can't see it affecting much of anything, especially offered at a higher price (as I'm sure it will be).  A .jpg saved at 12 is close enough to loseless that 99% of buyers don't care, otherwise we would have heard them yelling for it for the last 6 years.

If iStock is the only site, it's not worth the effort for us.

PNG is lossless if all the edit process is lossless. Most of us shoot in .JPG, or - even when we have raw - it's a huge work to re-process all files just for PNGs, so PNGs will most likely derive from .JPGs.

PNG is good for illustrations and isolations, but other kind of photos are equally or better compressed in lossless TIFF. Which never had much success at sites already offering it anyway.

Personally - while I can hear the difference between lossy and lossless music - I am not equally concerned with lossy pictures, as the loss of quality is minimal. I only use lossless TIFF for intermediate edits and then export to .JPG for publication. Broadband internet is still slow in many parts of the world, except a few metropolitan areas with high-speed fiber-optics directly connected to backbones.

So I think there's some room for PNGs in the future, but it's not a huge industry-changing event.

PNG files include gamma values, background color, and textual metadata information. PNG also supports color management through the inclusion of ICC color space profiles.


An awful lot of consumers don't know they want something until it is offered. Look at the iPad. I can't think of a microstock site that has ever offered lossless files. Of course the big selling point will be files with transparency.

It's possible there's something really big on the horizon that no designer on the forums at iStock has ever once asked about (AFAIK; feel free to post a link if there is one), but this smacks to me more of iStock wanting to do something to get buyers back than it does of a customer-need-driven site enhancement.

My husband once worked for a startup that planned to capture a niche market by offering a compiler version of a language that was previously interpreted (MUMPS in case anyone cares). The big deal was supposed to be how much faster things would be with the compiled version. The problem was, all the customers were quite happy with the speed of things as they were. When people don't think they have a problem, trying to sell them a solution rarely gets you anywhere.

Doesn't matter that contributors are willing to make PNGs (which I'm not sure I am as I haven't yet heard enough to understand what I'd have to do); if buyers don't care, it'll be a waste of everyone's time and energy. I don't think the iPad analogy is apt. There's no purchase lust involved in file formats - there is in sleekly designed consumer gadgets.

Unless their project is for print, then they'll probably want a clipping path that they can edit. Really the whole thing looks less about need and more about regurgitating some buzzword. I make pngs for my clients, but that is of vectors which is a one click process. I'm just not seeing the big value or excitement here, but there haven't been a lot of details released either.

PNG is a web format. From Wikipedia:

Sounds like another give more/get less initiative.

That's what I was thinking. If they are willing to pay contributors more for the pngs (and by more, I mean more than another penny or two), then it might be worth it. But again, this is microstock.

Also, I believe that someone in another thread has mentioned that DT has been offering .png formats for awhile. Haven't heard a ton of buyers requesting that, otherwise DT would have made an appeal to contributors to submit them.

I use .pngs for web graphics when I want them to have transparent areas. Never thought they should be used for print, though. But hey, I learn a lot here.

You can do it yourself. Photoshop>Image>Mode>CMYK.

When I see PNGs selling in large numbers, and the contributors who uploaded them crowing about their huge increase in monthly royalties as a result, then I will consider bothering with them.  Not until then. 

JSnover I agree.
There are a lot of small advantages of a PNG over a lossless JPG, but maybe that's not the primary reason...gotta  think like marketing folks do, not like a graphic designer. It could be part of a marketing strategy. Maybe they are going to market this format,  try to set a new trend..who knows maybe PNG is going to be the new thing at least in the buyer's mind.
I'd love to get more sales anything helps.

You don't seem to know muzch about DTP to be honest. Having CMYK or not doesn't make the slightest bit of difference for stuff downloaded from the net, coz it's gonna be RGB anyway. Process printing runs on CTP systems which print from PDF (simplifying things here a bit) PDF-pro does a one click conversion of all images embedded to CMYK before printing. Of course the 'print-guy' might not do that one click, which means he is an idiot, because the software actually warns you about this.