Comparing PNG with other image formats

Among the variety of image formats there are some that are lossy, and some that are lossless. The lossy compression takes advantage of the fact that the human eye will not be able to really notice the difference in the image quality, even though the quality loss definitely takes place. The most common image formats that provide lossy compression algorithms are JPEG, GIF, and PNG. ImageConverter Plus provides comprehensive support for all three image formats , so our users have a dilemma once in a while as to which format to prefer. Comparing PNG with GIF, PNG compresses greater than the latter one, plus provides more transparency options, such as alpha channel. GIF’s color depth is limited. It can only take 8 bits of indexed color, while PNG supports 24 or 8 bits per channel and even 48 bits for true color images. This means that images saved in PNG can be smoother and more precise in color. PNG cannot bypass GIF in one ability though – support of animation. The JPEG image format is known for high compression capabilities. JPEG and PNG seem to be similar in the way they can compress the images, and the higher image quality of PNG will be barely noticeable. PNG should be preferred for line arts or images containing text, because in comparison with PNG, JPEG does not support transparency.