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You would have achieved similarly amazing compression results if you had converted your PNGs to ordinary jpgs - no "state of the art stuff" required. You say you don't care whether it's lossy or lossless as long as it looks good - why were you using such an inappropriate format for photos on the web in the first place?

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True, jpegs would have achieved similar. I liked PNGs over the years because of the alpha channel, which was super useful. WebP is the only format I know that is both lossy and has an alpha channel.

Sure, but... the pictures here don't have alpha channels.

I agree with you, it might not have chosen the best example pictures to use. Something with an alpha channel png->webp could be a better showcase. Thanks

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