What is the difference between a PNG format picture and a GIF format picture?

First, whether they are PNG, JPG, or GIF format, they have one thing in common, they are all picture formats, which can be generated directly from common cartographic software such as PS. Below, we introduce the characteristics and differences between the three of them separately.

GIF image format: 1987 born, often used for Web animation, using lossless compression, support 256 colors (commonly called 8 bit color), support a single transparent color;

GIF format Picture effect

JPEG image (JPG): 1992 was born, photos are generally used in this format, lossy compression, the real color of the bit (224 = 170,000 colors), does not support animation, does not support transparent color;

PNG image format: 1996, lossless compression, the most common use format is 256 indexed color (PNG-8) and the real Color (PNG-24) (PNG supported color format is much more than this), support full alpha channel (256-level adjustable translucent color), does not support animation 。

Simple comparison of three image formats:

JPEG and PNG image comparison: JPEG has a huge advantage in photo compression, which is irreplaceable, but JPEG is lossy compression, image quality will be lost. In addition, the general screen screenshot in PNG format, not only higher than JPEG quality and file size is also smaller.

GIF and PNG image comparison: GIF only in the field of simple animation has advantages (in fact, GIF 256 color limit and lossless compression mechanism resulting in the release of high-quality animation generally use Flash and other formats), as long as there is no animation, PNG can completely replace GIF. In general, GIF is divided into static GIF and animated GIF two kinds, with the extension of. gif, is a compressed bitmap format, support transparent background image, for a variety of operating systems, "size" is very small, many small animations on the web are GIF format. In fact, GIF is to save a number of images as an image file, thus forming an animation, so in the final analysis, GIF is still a picture file format. However, GIF can only display 256 colors. As with the JPG format, this is a very popular graphics file format on the Web. So in general, the dynamic images we see on our web pages are usually in GIF format.

In the network of general small icons in many image formats are used png,png is a picture storage format, can be used as a material directly, because it has a very good feature: transparent background. In the production of image selection is what format output, mainly based on the image format characteristics to select the best output.