Friday, November 8, 2013

The differences between JPG, GIF, PNG image

Looking back to the past few years when the Internet was still very young, there were limited image file formats: JPG and GIF. The world is moving on, so is the technology. Now, there are more awesome file formats available such as PNG, BMP, TIF, etc. While JPG, GIF and PNG are the three most prevalent formats widely used to display images on the Internet, such as website, blogs, etc.
Quite often, we need to decide what format should we use since the image sizes will not only reduce the overall server memory consumption, but also increase page loading speed, which is a nice SEO boost as well.
By knowing the main differences between these three image formats, we will have a clear idea of which one to use.
JPG(or JPEG) is the most commonly used format on the Web. It is always used by professional photographers to share their masterpiece online because it can compress the highly-detailed images beautifully with very little quality loss. By adapting the compression method, JPG helps to removes non-human-visible colors from images so as to decrease the file size. It is a good choice to use a JPG for product photos, human portraits and other images, however, when you want the image to be transparent, you had better forget about the JPG since it cannot support transparency at all. Tips on how to convert SWF to JPG.
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. It is also a lossly compression file format. Since it can reduce the number of colors in an image to 256,it is an ideal choice for storing logos, graphs, text, iconic graphics, etc . It has got an unique ability of displaying the animated GIF which is linked together to create motion, or animation automatically. Besides, GIF can also load files in segments on the web pages.
PNG(Portable Network Graphics), a lossely compression format, which was originally developed as an alternative to for the out-of-date GIF format. PNG can support a larger range of colors than that of GIF and it also allows for 5 to 25 percent greater compression. Besides, PNG supports variable image transparency, therefore, it is widely used for displaying awesome images, icons for the web design. Owing to the non-lossy feature, when we save the PNG image for the second time, the quality of the saved image is identical to the original. Moreover, PNG is able to support image interlacing at a speed of nearly twice faster than that of the GIF image. Tips: if you have trouble on extracting SWF to PNG for wide use, kindly find more help from Firecoresoft SWF converter
There is not a magic formula to help us decide which image format should be used, perhaps a simple summarized guideline will be of some help. 1.JPG is the best choice for photographs or images which contain some photographic elements. 2. PNG is suited for the images which involve the charts, screenshots or texts, etc. 3. Use PNG or JPG if the image is of several different colors. 4. Choose GIF if the image is of few colors and no alpha transparency effect is required, on the contrast, use the PNG instead.

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