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Information about GIF
File extension
gif
File category
Raster Image file
Stands for
Graphics Interchange Format
Developer
CompuServe
Overview
GIF is an image format which is known worldwide and it is used as a second option after JPEG. It offers high portability between OS(Operating Systems) and applications. Each picture can support up to 8 bits per pixel, as a resultant, it enables an image to have a separate palette of up to 256 distinct colours that are taken from the 24-bit RGB colour space. Furthermore, it is commonly used for web graphics, logos with solid colour and also for animated images. These files are saved as ‘animated GIFs' and it displays general animations on websites. Besides this, this format has the capability to blend varied colour backgrounds due to the presence of transparent pixels. It should be noted that pixels should be either fully transparent or opaque so that it doesn’t result in the faded picture.
Technical description
GIF is an inadequate format for colour photographs due to palette limitations. It enables an independent palette of up to 256 colors for a solo frame. These files are compressed using a lossless data compression algorithm known as LZW( Lempel-Ziv-Welch) and this algorithm was created by Abraham Lempel, Jacob Ziv and Terry Welch. It removes the unwanted colours that are not in use to compress raster data. The maximum limit which is permitted for colours is 256 and the minimum is 2 (black and white). Apart from this, it has a fixed-length header which gives the version and pixel dimensions are provided by the ‘logical screen' descriptor.
Links
wikipedia.org

Information about PNG
File extension
png
File category
Raster image file
Stands for
Portable Network Graphics
Developer
PNG development Group(Donated to World wide web Consortium/ W3C)
Overview
These files are commonly termed as ‘ping' and they store the raster files using lossless compression. It came into existence in order to replace the GIF file format as they both have the ability to show transparent backgrounds. Furthermore, it was an enhanced and improved version of Graphics Interchange format. It supports different types of photos. The first one is palette-based photographs that can either have palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colours. Second is grayscale images which may or may not have an alpha channel for transparency. Lastly, there is a full-colour non-palette which is based on RGB/RGBA pictures. There is one limitation of this type. It does not support animation like GIF. Besides this, it is non-patented which means there are no copyright limitations.
Technical description
The expanded features like 8- bit channel for transparency and 24- bit RGB support make PNG more popular. The files stores in this format allow the fading of colours from opaque to transparent which is not present in the preceding format. CMYK does not offer support to this extension as it was developed for transferring of files over the internet, not for professional-quality print graphics. It stores information like textual comments, integrity checks and encoded basic pixels in its extensible structure of chunks. It always starts with an 8-byte signature followed by a series of chunks. A chunk furthermore comprises of four parts- length (4 bytes), chunk type (4 bytes), chunk data (length bytes) and CRC- Cyclic redundancy checksum or code (4 bytes).
Links
wikipedia.org