PNG

MS Technology offers extensive experience working with PNG images and annotating them. MS Technology delivers the highest quality of PNG images and conversions to your users.

What is PNG?

PNG, Portable Network Graphics, is a lossless file format designed as a more open alternative to Graphics Interchange Format (GIF). PNG uses LZW compression, the same as used by TIFF file formats. Boiled down, PNG’s two-stage LZW compression takes strings of bits contained in the image’s data, then matches those longer sequences to accompanying shortcodes held in a codebook that is stored within the image file. The result is a smaller file that maintains high quality.

Advantages of PNG

• High, Lossless Resolution: The biggest advantage of PNG over JPEG is that the compression is lossless, meaning there is no loss in quality each time it is opened and saved again. PNG also handles detailed, high-contrast images well. It’s for this reason PNG is more often than not the default file format for screenshots, as it can provide an almost perfect pixel-for-pixel representation of the screen, rather than compressing groups of pixels together.
• Transparent Background: One of the standout features of PNG is its support of transparency. With both color and grayscale images, pixels in PNG files can be transparent. This allows you to create images that neatly overlay with the content of an image or website.
• Wide Color Depth: The format is suitable for different types of digital images such as photographs and graphics. It supports palette-based images with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors, as well as grayscale images, and full-color non-palette-based RGB/RGBA images.

Disadvantages of PNG

• Bigger File Size: A key drawback of PNG is that it compresses digital images at a larger file size. On the other hand, the JPEG standard can achieve a smaller file size than a PNG for a relatively similar image quality and resolution.
• Not Ideal for Printing: Note that this format was designed solely for distributing digital images online. Hence, another disadvantage of PNG is that it is not ideal for professional-quality print graphics because it does not support non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK.
• Other Shortcomings: The PNG format does not support embedding EXIF meta data used by most digital cameras. In addition, unlike the TIFF format, it does not allow for multipage documents.

MS Technology’s Solutions

MS Technology has over 25 years of experience and the leader with the PNG format with all of our products including the MST Viewer, eViewer HTML5 document viewer, and MST Batch Converter. MS Technology’s solutions can overcome many of the disadvantages of the PNG format including using our OCR module to provide text search and selection, and annotate PNG files. Our powerful viewers and conversion tools enable you to view, convert, manipulate, combine, annotate, redact and print PNG files.