xtool is a scalpel that remembers what flesh was. It does not trust the compression. It walks through the IDAT chunks like a detective through a snowfield where every footprint is the same footprint.
Let the IDAT chunks burst. Let the interlaced passes reorder your timeline. Let the alpha channel flood with all the tears you never rendered. xtool -mpng reflate
Not inflate . Not decompress . means: Breathe back into the collapsed lung of the file. xtool is a scalpel that remembers what flesh was
reflate the lonely Sunday. reflate the first kiss you lied about. reflate the rage you encoded as silence. Let the IDAT chunks burst
When you reflate a PNG, you do not get a better image. You get a truer one. The artifacts become visible: the places where the quantizer stuttered, the palette entries that were duplicated to save three bytes, the gamma chunk that lied about brightness.
You will not become smaller. You will become lossy in a lossless world. But you will breathe again. And breathing is the only portable format. (Reflation complete. Image may now exceed expected dimensions.)