The PNG raster graphic format appeared as a kind of maidan of free developers against the technological oligarchy, money-grubbing and greed that stifled the development of the Internet.
In the mid-nineties of the last century, the First Internet Revolution was raging. The consortium of the world wide network W3C as a result of a bloodless coup removed the legally elected (by bribery of the electorate) Temporary Representation in the person of Microsoft and Netscape. The latter were unable to agree on standards and pushed the young digital civilization to the brink of a browser war.
There is an urgent need to introduce a general unification of Internet technologies. However, the GIF graphics format that existed at that time had a small, but significant drawback - it had a commercial license, including for data compression technology.
As usual, no one wanted to pay, so in order to avoid chaos on the world wide web, when the sites of one developer cannot be viewed on the browsers of another, a group of volunteer programmers created the PNG specification, which turned out to be no worse than GIF, and in some characteristics had significant advantages.
Technical features of the PNG format
In general, if you look closely, PNG differs from GIF in much the same way as MS Office differs from LibreOffice. At the heart of the raster graphics with compression, an indexed color palette. However, the PNG developers have taken into account the mistakes of GIF and managed to rid the new technology of the oppressive problems of the past.
- The PNG compression scheme provided complete lossless restoration of the original image, regardless of the compression rate.
- Greater level of data compression.
- An unlimited number of colors were allowed in the image. This made it possible to ensure the quality and realism of the picture almost at the level of the photographic format JPEG.
- Support for multilevel transparency of layers.
- The PNG format allows you to save all intermediate stages of image editing and restore any step without loss in quality.
We can say that the only drawback of PNG is the inability to save several images in one file, which does not allow using this technology to create animated images. There were attempts to create versions of this format with the possibility of animation, but they were no longer in demand - at the beginning of the 21st century, the license expired and the GIF graphics format became free for use for any purpose.
Scope of PNG
Portable Network Graphics translates roughly as "portable network graphics". Even in the name of the project, an imitation of GIF is noticeable - "a graphic format for exchange over networks".
To disown the dark past, the creators of PNG have circulated the recursive acronym "Ping is Not a GIF" on the Internet.
Ping is the British pronunciation of PNG, in American English it rather sounds like Ping-n-ji, for a Russian-speaking observer it is peenge.
In fact, the revolutionary format for packaging graphics turned out to be very good and today it is the most popular for preparing images for publication on websites, blogs and social networks due to its outstanding qualities.
- Cross-platform - readable equally well by all types of modern browsers and graphic editors.
- It is lightweight with high image quality.
- Easily compressed into a wide range without loss of quality.
Of course, if you use PNG in printing, for example, for the sadness of large color posters or photographs where realistic images are required, the JPEG format performs better. However, when posting photos to websites for viewing on computer monitors, especially on small displays on mobile devices, users will not notice any difference between a PNG and a JPEG photo. More precisely, to notice the difference, you need to either look closely or be a professional photographer.
For sites, it is more important to have a small weight of images in order not to slow down the loading of web pages.
If we take into account the statistics that, on average, visitors spend only a few seconds on sites, and the content is not studied in detail, but is scanned superficially with a quick glance, then the PNG image quality turns out to be optimal.
Benefits of PNG over JPEG
In the process of repeated compression and editing, images in JPEG files acquire distortions, color halos appear, and possibly pixel blocks.
If you need to publish on the site page a very clear diagram, with legible small details, infographics - here PNG shows much better results than JPEG, which is optimal for packing images in which the main requirement is realism - photographs of natural landscapes, animals, people.
The ability to create transparent layers makes PNG format indispensable for the development of logos, icons, symbols, buttons.
PNG has a function for storing metadata - date, time, place of creation of the image, information about the author, copyright holders, etc. This is useful to remember when you are going to publish an image borrowed on the Internet. To prevent Google from identifying a duplicate, you need to remove the metadata from the file (using a graphical editor).
Free online image to PNG converter
On this site, you can easily convert almost any image to PNG format, while you can set the color depth from 1 bit to 64 bit, as well as set the compression level.
Note that in order to get transparency in the resulting image, you need to use depth from RGBA color. In this case, the letter A means - alpha channel, i.e. transparent.
PNG optimization
Not all programs make PNGs with a minimal file size. Therefore, before publishing a picture on the site, it is recommended to optimize it. For these purposes, you can use various utilities, or use our online optimization service. Just select an image and click "Optimize".
PNG (Portable Network Graphic) file refers to bitmaps. The PNG format contains a specific palette of colors used in a drawing. A similar graphic format is quite often used on the World Wide Web when endowing web pages with various images. By using the Deflate compression algorithm, bitmaps with the PNG file extension are available for compression without any apparent quality loss.
We developed this file format to replace the GIF format, because the latter required paid software for a long time. Among the owners of web resources, PNG images are famous for their excellent characteristics against the background of similar formats. PNG supports up to 48-bit color depth. The main difference between GIF is that such a graphic file is limited to only 8 bits (256 colors in total). Please be aware that unlike GIF, PNG does not have support for animation effects.
You can open a file that has a PNG extension using virtually any viewer. In Windows operating system, PNG can be opened with a simple double click to view the images. This image format works in any web browser as well. If the user needs to change the saved image in the PNG version, it is enough to use image editing utilities such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Windows Photos, as well as Corel PaintShop or ACD Systems.
This file extension is very popular and contains all the necessary graphic information for good quality full color images.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics), pronounced "ping", is a bitmap format for storing graphic information using lossless compression. PNG was created to both enhance and replace GIF with a license-free graphics format. PNG is an international standard (ISO IEC 15948: 2003) and is officially recommended by the W3C.
The PNG format stores graphic information in a compressed form. Moreover, this compression is performed without "loss", unlike, for example, standard JPEG (even with the highest quality level).
The PNG format is designed to replace the older and simpler GIF format, and to some extent to replace the much more complex TIFF format.
If we are talking about web design, then in comparison with GIF it has the following main advantages:
Improved compression: In most cases, the PNG image is smaller than the GIF image.
- More colors in the image: Almost unlimited number of colors in the image, while the limit for GIF is 256.
- Optional support for alpha channel: While GIF only supports binary transparency, PGN allows you to achieve an unlimited number of transparency effects through support for the alpha channel.
As a disadvantage, of course, it is worth noting the lack of support for animation, like GIF. Although, of course, there is a similar standard for animation called Multiple-image Network Graphics (MNG), it is not widespread and, accordingly, is not widely supported by modern browsers.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a raster-type graphic format containing an 8-bit color palette. The Deflate compression algorithm developed for PNG files reduces the size of the saved image without losing the quality of the final image.
This article will also show you how to open a PNG file.
Characteristic
PNG is the second most popular internet format after JPG.
Among other advantages, it is worth noting:
- interlaced layout;
- built-in software color palette and gamma correction.
The latter allows you to embed all the necessary display parameters into the image so that it looks on all screens as the author intended.
Format has 2 versions:
- PNG-8 (the index color gamut is similar to that in GIF);
- PNG-24 (full and full color palette imitating JPEG).
History of origin
In 1995, in the era of the development of the free Internet, the question of the proprietary nature of the complex GIF format arose sharply. An equally reliable but free and free format was needed for the exchange of graphic data on the World Wide Web. At this time, PNG 1.0 specifications were presented at the international consortium W3C, approved already in 1996.
The format was created as an alternative to GIF. The latter was “closed” until 2004, that is, it had a number of restrictions for free use (it required the copyright of the owner when preserving, patent licenses when placed). PNG was deprived of such shortcomings, while they implemented support for color depth up to 48 bits and an 8-bit alpha channel for image transmission.
The developers managed to create smooth transparency of colors, impossible in GIF. In the latter, the palette is limited to an 8-bit channel (256 colors) and only full transparency is supported.
How to open PNG files
Today, the graphic format is easily demonstrated in the Internet browser and standard graphics viewers. In more detail, the picture is as follows: each OS has its own toolkit for working with the format. Let's take a closer look at how to open the PNG format.
Online
Use the following software to view files on the Internet:
Windows 7-10
Windows operating systems open PNG format in the following way:
- photo viewer;
- MS Paint;
- web browser (view only).
Android
The mobile OS has the following tools:
iOS
Mobile Cat for Apple works with PNG files using this software.
