RasterEdge .NET imaging SDKs and web image viewer may work perfectly with PNG images, allowing users to viewing, editing, annotating, converting and printing PNG images from web server or desktop applications.
What is PNG?
Known as Portable Network Graphics, PNG is a bitmap image file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of raster (bitmap) images. The initial purpose of PNG creation is to develop a patent-free image file format to replace GIF with much more functionalities, to some extent, the much more complex TIFF format. Unlike other simple image file format, PNG support indexed-color, grayscale, and true color images, plus an optional alpha channel for transparency.
PNG can be used in many fields, and image-editing and transferring images on the Internet are two major uses. For web transferring, PNG supports alpha channels, gamma correction, two-dimensional interlacing and better compression than GIF. As for image-editing, up to 48-bit true color or 16-bit grayscale is supported by PNG for restoring and re-saving an image without image quality reductions.
PNG Features
Advantages
- Support more than 256 colors
- Up to 48-bit true color and 16-bit grayscale support
- Apply Lossless image compression
- Support Alpha channels (partial or full transparency)
- Support Gamma Correction for image brightness
- Use progressive display to represent an image as a two-dimensional array of colored dots
- Include ancillary information
- Support streamability to display full image on the web
Disadvantages
- Do not support non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK
- No support on old browsers
- Do not support animation
Note: PNG processing and conversion is excluded in the standard RasterEdge .NET Imaging SDK, you may add it on with PNG Convertor or .NET PNG Convertor SDK.
Viewing, Editing and Conversion
- RasterEdge .NET Imaging SDK enables customers to easily build PNG viewing, editing, manipulation, annotating, and print PNG into your applications right from your desktop or server.
- PNG Converter is a free conversion application, which is an easy-to-use interface enabling you to quickly convert your PNG images into other file formats, including Bitmap, Png, Gif, Tiff, PDF, MS-Word, etc. Besides, Visual C# and VB.NET sample codings are provided for image conversion if you want to use it in .NET development environments.
More Format Information
