PNG which stands for Portable network Graphics is widely used and popular format of images. Though it had few major cons like it is not supported by all the browsers, with the latest compatible browsers it is becoming more and more popular. PNG is treated as a more advanced version of the GIF format with lot of improvement. The PNG image in a lossless possibly has 5% to 25% more compression than the GIF format of the same image. Transparency is the main idea behind a PNG format which is not possible with GIF up to that level. The only major disadvantage a PNG has is lack animation.

Following are major features of PNG format.

• Improved Indexation – color images of up to 256 colors.

• Streaming – It is possible to read and write PNG file in a serial order so that file format can be used as a communicating protocol.

• Progressive display – It is possible to display an PNG image as it is received as a communication link while interacting. It is shown as yielded image with the lower resolution at the start and then the original one with original specifications.

• Transparency – As discussed in the starting of this post a PNG image can be marked as a transparent one by creating effect.

• Truecolor and Grayscale images – PNG supports up to 48 bits for truecolor images and up to 16 bits for grayscale images.

• Ancillary information – It is possible to store textual comments and other type of data withing a PNG file.

• Good replacement for GIF – PNG has covered lot drawbacks of GIF format like more effective 100% lossless compression, legally unencumbered, more reliable, straightforward detection of file corruption, full alpha channel.

Bookmark To:

Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), a very popular bitmap format of images due to its portability and wide supportability. GIF format has the ability to allow a unique image to use 256 distinct colors which are selected from 24-bit RGB color space, 8 bits are supported for each pixel in this format, but the more special thing about this format is it supports to animation and allows multiple palettes of 256 colors in each frame. Due to having ability to animate a image GIF is most widely used and most suitable for small graphics and professional logos.

GIF uses lossless compression technique which supports only 256 colors and this differentiate it from the JPG. In lossless techniques by adoption of data compression technique there is no data lost, which maintain the quality of image as original. PKZIP is the well-known compression technique of lossless compression. Maximum space reduced can be up to 50 % only in any other lossless compression technique. If one want more compression to reduce more size then lossy compression technique is recommended for it, but on the other side lossy compression technique can be tolerated by cetain types of files like graphics, audio and video. Hence lossless technique is more effective than lossy in terms of quality maintenance of any file. This difference in two types of compression techniques also differs the GIF format from JPG format because lossy compression is used in JPG type format. Animation editor makes it possible to put together a GIF image as a animated image, further more it can be also supportable for image transparency which is an important aspect from designing point of view. Unisys is the company which owns the compression algorithms of GIF format hence one need to license from them to use it.

Bookmark To:

GD library is an open source code library for the creation of images dynamically by the programmers. It can create many types of images which includes formats like PNG, JPEG, GIF and WBMP. In general GD is used to create charts, thumbnails, graphics and many more.

GD is designed in ANSI C programming language, however it can interface with many other programming language. This software is a developed by Thomas Boutell .It originally was designed for GIF draws, however since the revoking of Unisys license it stood for “Graphics draw “in general.

It is a very easy to use software and can be used for variety of graphics functions such as lines, arcs, text (using selected fonts), creating the images with other images and multiple colors. The latest versions support for truecolor images, alpha channels, and resampling as well and it also support various other features.

As stated earlier it is created in ANSI C language and it supports languages such as C, PHP, Perl, Python, OCml, Tcl, Pascal, GNU Octave, REXX, and Ruby.  It has an added tool “Fly” command line interpreter which allows image creation using GD. This helps in writing  scripts in any language and run it using Fly

Mostly GD is used with PHP, and it has moved to libgd.org.

Bookmark To:

Websites being completely flooded by images there exist a need for such a support.

ImageMagick is a software suite which allows a user to create edit and compose the bitmap images. It also allows to convert images to various other formats(more than 100) which includes DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. You can write, read,translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear, color formatting, special effects etc.

You can utilize the functionality of the ImageMagick from command line as it does not have GUI based interface to edit images. You can use it through code written in your hands on language.

You all would be happy to hear that this software is totally free with all its features and it is also Open source.It is ready to run binary distribution. It is licensed under GPL, ImageMagick License and BSD-Style license. It also supports all widely used Operating System.

This software is used by number of other programs to create image thumbnails such as MediaWiki, phpBB, vBulletin.

ImageMagick use a fully integrated API called PerlMagick..

Should we see some of its features.

File Format Conversion: It converts image from one format to other.

Transform: Resizes the images, rotates it, crop, flip or trim an image.

Draw: It adds shapes to the image and text also.

Decorate: It adds border or frame  to the image

Special effects: It adds special effects such as blur, sharpen, threshold, or tint an image.

Animation: It helps to create a sequence from a group of images, animate a image.

Text and comment: It helps to add a descriptive or artistic text in an image.

Image identification: It describes the format and properties of an image.

Composite: It allows to overlap one image over another.

Montage: Image thumbnails on an image canvas.

Motion Picture support: It reads and writes the common image formats used in digital film works.

Image calculator: user can apply a mathematical expression to an image.

DFT: It Discrete Fourier Transform which is implemented in forward and reverse.

High range dynamic Images: It accurately represent the variety of real scenes ranging from the brightest to the deepest.

Virtual pixel support: It allows a good access to pixel outside the image region

Many more…

Bookmark To: