Png?
 

Acording to the FAQ, Brain says he uses the .gif format becuase .png always doesn't load for some people. But the recent slew of comics (actually, as far back as ep.270) he's used .png.

Why the change of heart?

Photoshop has awful PNG compression. Now I have access to GIMP which has excellent PNG compression. So I do my comics in Photoshop, save them as huge PNGs, then open them up in GIMP and "fix" the image so that it's a decent size.

Indeed. The GIMP is teh r0xx0rs. Also, there's this little command line based program called pngcrush (project page here) that can be used to save an extra couple of kilobytes off of each file. It may not seem like much, but with traffic the size of Brian's, that can make quite a bit of difference.

Edit, I tested this program on the most recent 8-bit Theater by using this command on the command line: "pngcrush 040214.png test.png", and it did indeed shave off 2 kb.

GIMP, eh? I've had an awful time making PNGs ofn a decent size that don't look like crap, so I'll have to give this program a try. If it runs on my computer, of course.

Windows GIMP is slower than a sleeping turtle. Linux GIMP rocks.

But the both are WAY better than Photocrap.

Windows GIMP is slow? Must be your system or something, mine is as fast as Photoshop which, itself, does pretty much everything without much, if any, delay.

Do you know if Paint Shop Pro has the same PNG compression?

Shameless Plug for... Something
 

Paint Shop Pro has better PNG support, corrding to Jasc's site. Course, that could easily be internal propoganda.

I do know for certain, however, that Macromedia Fireworks has excellent PNG support, as that is their default format. It's also shiny. Very shiny, you want it.

I'm still using Photoshop, is it really that bad in comparison these days? O.o I might have to get updated if so. Either way, I usually stick to JPEGs and GIFs, but then, I don't host websites with my imagery.

Well, if you use it only for the PNG conversion thing, you may not see the difference.