Portable Network Graphics

Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a raster image file format that supports lossless data compression.

Description

PNG was created as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), and is the most used lossless image compression format on the Internet.

PNG supports palette-based images (with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), grayscale images (with or without alpha channel), and full-color non-palette-based RGB[A] images (with or without alpha channel).

PNG was designed for transferring images on the Internet, not for professional-quality print graphics, and therefore does not support non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK.

PNG files nearly always use file extension PNG or png and are assigned MIME media type image/png.

See also

• Computer graphics
• GIF
• Graphics software
• Image file format
• JPEG
• Lossless data compression

Exterior Links

• Portable Network Graphics @ Wikipedia