[perth]

Sometimes dithering is the right option depending on your use case. If it’s purely getting the smallest size, for example, go into Adobe Photoshop “save for web” and mess around with the various algorithms, formats, and dithering settings. Photoshop has a live preview with live updating file size. I’ve always found limited palette pngs and gifs with dithering tended to be the smallest. It also depends on the contents of your image and all of that. And there are many cases for complex images where a jpeg will be able to represent the image at a smaller size with greater clarity.