Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression. PNG was created to improve upon and replace GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) as an image-file format not requiring a patent license. It is pronounced /ˈpɪŋ/ or spelled out as P-N-G. The PNG acronym is optionally recursive, unofficially standing for “PNG's Not GIF”.
PNG supports palette-based (palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), greyscal...
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Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression. PNG was created to improve upon and replace GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) as an image-file format not requiring a patent license. It is pronounced /ˈpɪŋ/ or spelled out as P-N-G. The PNG acronym is optionally recursive, unofficially standing for “PNG's Not GIF”.
PNG supports palette-based (palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), greyscale, RGB, or RGBA images. PNG was designed for transferring images on the Internet, not professional graphics, and so does not support other color spaces (such as CMYK).
PNG files nearly always use file extension "PNG" or "png" and are assigned MIME media type "image/png" (approved October 14, 1996).
The motivation for creating the PNG format was in early 1995, after it had come to light that the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) data compression algorithm—used in the GIF format—had been patented by Unisys. For more on this controversy, see: GIF (Unisys...
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