What is the benefit of a PNG file?

Question

How and when would you choose to a PNG file versus a JPG or GIF?

Are there negatives such as a PNG reduces image quality? or PNG's are not readily readable universally?

Answer 1

Two advantages. GIF used technology which was quietly patented by UNISYS in the 1980s. The patent expired a few years ago, I believe. When UNISYS raised the issue, though - the developer community decided to ditch GIF file support by providing an alternative.



PNG files have all the advantages of the GIF file - plus, they do a much better job of compression.



I have done lots of full screen screenshots and the PNG files were a tiny fraction of the file size of the GIF files. It was crazy; the image quality was the same and the size of the PNG file was like 1/5 or 1/10 of the GIF file. That alone makes it way better.



The tradeoff is that really old software does not support it. I think people are kind of dumping those obsolete programs, for a lot of reasons. These days people are using Firefox, Macs, Linux - they are not going to have any problem looking at a PNG file.



People with older, legacy operating systems and applications might think they are not going to be in a position to look at the PNG files. No problem; they can just get Firefox and use that as a file viewer.

Answer 2

Why would someone answer "I dunno"?



Anyways a PNG has all of the benefits of a Gif, but with more colors (gif only has 256 values for R G and B) PNG also adds A which is called Alpha. That is used for transparency.



So PNG has all the colors of a JPG, better transparency than Gif and with the same lossless of Gif. PNG also compresses better than GIF but less than Jpg.



Not being a 'lossy' format is important. Every time you save a JPG, you lose part of the image. This is not the case for GIF or PNG.



JPG - good for huge pictures. Keeps filesize nice and small.



PNG - good for high quality photo's that need to blend into the background.



GIF - great for tiny images, such as buttons on a web page.

Answer 3

PNG provides good quality comparing with JPG but it's not advisable to use in web pages since there is no guarentee to be viewed by visitor. U can use it when import or export graphics work between graphics programs for better quality.

Answer 4

i hav no idea