Table of Content
File Type & Extension
Application Category & Support
Owned by Organization
MIME & File Header
Supported Image Formats
How to open PNG file
Tools to open PNG file
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PNG (.png) File Format

PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics. It is an open source file extension for raster graphics files. It was created as an alternative to GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), which was commonly used to support lossless image compression. PNG is an open extensible file format for lossless compressed images.

PNG file extension falls under lossless bitmap image file format.

The File extension for portable Network Graphics is *.png.

  • Browsers: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, etc.
  • Image editors: Corel Graphics Editor, CorelDRAW, Flash, PPT, FreeHand, etc.
  • Image converters: Web Designer's Toolkit, WebGraphics Optimizer, Xenomorph, etc.
  • 3D Applications, Games, Entertainment, Office and Business Applications, etc.
  • Scientific, Graphing Applications and many more Miscellaneous Applications

PNG Development Group of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

  • PNG is attributed with image/png MIME media type.

The 8-byte signature for a PNG file in hex value is 89 50 4E 47 0D 0A 1A 0A.

Supported Image Formats

PNG supports palettes images of

  • 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors coding
  • grayscale images
  • full-color non-palette-based RGB

Note: PNG does not support non-RGB color formats such as CMYK since it was designed for mainly transferring images on the Internet, not for professional-quality graphics images.

PNG file can be opened using any free image viewer.

 

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