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I’m not alone on this, Jeff Atwood, founder of StackOverflow and the Coding Horror blog, will agree. Short answer: Always use PNG over GIF unless you are making an animated GIF or when you want to use images with transparent backgrounds on older versions of IE (however, there’s a workaround for supporting PNG transparencies in IE6 and below, using JavaScript PNG fix libraries). Let’s compare the advantages and disadvantages of using PNG versus the two other popular web image formats. Since it’s a lossless format, images saved using the PNG format aren’t going to be small all the time, but because PNG stores a lot of additional data, you can easily optimize images for web usage to reduce file sizes. Google web designer image button full#When you need to preserve transparency and large amounts of color, as well as achieve full or partial transparency, the PNG image format is the best. This difference is not 100% true because Adobe products’ Save for Web command allows PNG-8 with alpha transparency. Another difference is that PNG-24 natively supports alpha transparency, which is good for transparent backgrounds. To sum up the difference in plain English: Let’s just say PNG-24 can handle a lot more color and is good for complex images with lots of color such as photographs (just like JPEG), while PNG-8 is more optimized for things with simple colors, such as logos and user interface elements like icons and buttons. The numbers are shorthand for saying “8-bit PNG” or “24-bit PNG.” Not to get too much into technicalities - because as a web designer, you probably don’t care - 8-bit PNGs mean that the image is 8 bits per pixel, while 24-bit PNGs mean 24 bits per pixel. There are two PNG formats: PNG-8 and PNG-24. In short: the PNG image format is not optimal for graphics that will be printed. The CMYK color model, which is typically for print purposes, is not available when saving images in PNG format. PNG was designed for quickly transferring images on the web and for displaying images in computer screens, so it only uses the RGB color model. However, raster images are better than vector images for complex images such as photographs. If you skipped Design 101, raster images, unlike vector image formats such as SVG, cannot be rescaled without losing quality. Some Technical Stuff about PNGĪside from using lossless compression, PNG is a bitmapped image format, which just means it’s a raster image format. What this essentially means is that, by saving your original images using JPEG, you might witness some quality loss (the same goes for PNG in certain situations, as you’ll see later on). On the other hand, JPEG uses a lossy compression algorithm. PNG uses a lossless compression algorithm. When you unzip your document, it will be the same as the original. Google web designer image button zip#An example of lossless compression is when you are zipping up a document using the ZIP format. Lossless compression involves compression algorithms that when decompressed, will get you exactly the same image as the original. On the other hand, lossless compression is the opposite of lossy. The data loss, in most instances, is done in such a way that you don’t lose too much quality at least not enough that people will notice. This means that you will not get the exact same image as the original if you try to decompress it. Lossy compression is when the compression algorithm being used results in some loss in data. There are two general kinds of image compression methods: lossy and lossless. Some digital image formats, especially those designed for print (such as TIFF) are so unnecessarily high in resolution, metadata, and color-richness - which all become irrelevant when viewed in computer monitors - that they are too big in file size for web use. Why are certain image formats suitable for the web, while others aren’t?īecause images on the web must be optimized and highly compressed so that they don’t get too huge. Examples of image formats for the web are JPEG, PNG, GIF, and SVG. There are many digital image formats available for you to use, but only some of them are optimized for web use.įor example, the TIFF image format is not designed for web use it’s used for printing. In this guide, we will cover everything you, as a web designer, need to know about the PNG image format. Google web designer image button portable#PNG, which stands for Portable Network Graphics, gained popularity and, nowadays, it’s probably the most used image format when it comes to web design, alongside JPEG. This change sped up the development for its successor: the PNG format. Google web designer image button software#Then, it was announced that software programs using GIF would require a license (this was because of the Unisys patent for the LZW compression method used in GIF). Once upon a time, there was the mighty GIF image format, the most popular type of image compression for web graphics. ![]()
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