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A .png file is a Portable Network Graphic (PNG) image. PNG images are a common format for web graphics. They use indexed color palettes for lossless compression and can include an alpha channel to support transparent and semi-transparent backgrounds. PNG images can be saved as 8-bit images using up to 256 colors, or 24-bit images with more than 16 million colors. 8-bit PNGs are smaller than 24-bit PNGs since they allow fewer colors.

Since PNG images are one of the most common file types on the Internet, they are easy to open and convert. A photograph saved as a PNG can be converted to a JPEG (.jpg) to save disk space with a little loss of quality. PNG images with transparent backgrounds can also be converted to GIF (.gif) images to preserve some transparency, although GIFs don't have a full alpha channel and therefore don't support semi-transparent pixels.

Converting to .PNG

The PNG format is very versatile and a good choice for most types of images. Converting a JPEG to a PNG will make it larger since PNG uses lossless compression. Converting a GIF to a PNG is often seamless because both formats use indexed color palettes to compress images. Converting other lossless image types like bitmap (.bmp) or TIFF (.tif) to PNG can reduce file size without affecting image quality.