PNG

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a raster graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was created as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), and is the most widely used lossless image compression format on the Internet.

PNG supports palette-based images (with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), grayscale images (with or without alpha channel for transparency), and full-color non-palette-based RGB/RGBA images (with or without alpha channel). PNG was designed for transferring images on the Internet, not for professional-quality print graphics, and therefore does not support non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK. A PNG file contains a single image in an extensible structure of "chunks", encoding the basic pixels and other information such as textual comments and integrity checks.

PNG was approved for this use by the Internet Engineering Steering Group on 14 October 1996, and was published as an ISO/IEC standard in 2004.

Animation

PNG itself does not support animation at all. MNG is an extension to PNG that does; it was designed by members of the PNG Group. MNG shares PNG's basic structure and chunks, but it is significantly more complex and has a different file signature, which automatically renders it incompatible with standard PNG decoders.

The complexity of MNG led to the proposal of APNG by developers of the Mozilla Foundation. It is based on PNG, supports animation and is simpler than MNG. APNG offers fallback to single-image display for PNG decoders that do not support APNG.

"Chunks"

After the file header comes a series of chunks, each of which conveys certain information about the image. Chunks declare themselves as critical or ancillary, and a program encountering an ancillary chunk that it does not understand can safely ignore it. This chunk-based storage layer structure, similar in concept to a container format, is designed to allow the PNG format to be extended while maintaining compatibility with older versions—it provides forward compatibility, and this same file structure (with different signature and chunks) is used in the associated MNG, JNG, and APNG formats.

A chunk consists of four parts: length (4 bytes, big-endian), chunk type/name (4 bytes), chunk data (length bytes) and CRC (cyclic redundancy code/checksum; 4 bytes). The CRC is a network-byte-order CRC-32 computed over the chunk type and chunk data, but not the length.

Chunk types are given a four-letter case sensitive ASCII type/name; compare FourCC. The case of the different letters in the name (bit 5 of the numeric value of the character) is a bit field that provides the decoder with some information on the nature of chunks it does not recognize.

The case of the first letter indicates whether the chunk is critical or not. If the first letter is uppercase, the chunk is critical; if not, the chunk is ancillary. Critical chunks contain information that is necessary to read the file. If a decoder encounters a critical chunk it does not recognize, it must abort reading the file or supply the user with an appropriate warning.

The case of the second letter indicates whether the chunk is "public" (either in the specification or the registry of special-purpose public chunks) or "private" (not standardised). Uppercase is public and lowercase is private. This ensures that public and private chunk names can never conflict with each other (although two private chunk names could conflict).

The third letter must be uppercase to conform to the PNG specification. It is reserved for future expansion. Decoders should treat a chunk with a lower case third letter the same as any other unrecognised chunk.

The case of the fourth letter indicates whether the chunk is safe to copy by editors that do not recognize it. If lowercase, the chunk may be safely copied regardless of the extent of modifications to the file. If uppercase, it may only be copied if the modifications have not touched any critical chunks.

Critical chunks

A decoder must be able to interpret critical chunks to read and render a PNG file.

IHDR must be the first chunk; it contains (in this order) the image's width, height, bit depth, color type, compression method, filter method, and interlace method (13 data bytes total).

PLTE contains the palette; list of colors.

IDAT contains the image, which may be split among multiple IDAT chunks. Such splitting increases filesize slightly, but makes it possible to generate a PNG in a streaming manner. The IDAT chunk contains the actual image data, which is the output stream of the compression algorithm.

IEND marks the image end.

The PLTE chunk is essential for color type 3 (indexed color). It is optional for color types 2 and 6 (truecolor and truecolor with alpha) and it must not appear for color types 0 and 4 (grayscale and grayscale with alpha).

Ancillary chunks

Other image attributes that can be stored in PNG files include gamma values, background color, and textual metadata information. PNG also supports color management through the inclusion of ICC color space profiles.

bKGD gives the default background color. It is intended for use when there is no better choice available, such as in standalone image viewers (but not web browsers; see below for more details).

cHRM gives the chromaticity coordinates of the display primaries and white point.

gAMA specifies gamma.

hIST can store the histogram, or total amount of each color in the image.

iCCP is an ICC color profile.

iTXt contains a keyword and UTF-8 text, with encodings for possible compression and translations marked with language tag. The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) uses this chunk with a keyword 'XML:com.adobe.xmp'.

pHYs holds the intended pixel size and/or aspect ratio of the image.

sBIT (significant bits) indicates the color-accuracy of the source data.

sPLT suggests a palette to use if the full range of colors is unavailable.

sRGB indicates that the standard sRGB color space is used.

sTER stereo-image indicator chunk for stereoscopic images.

tEXt can store text that can be represented in ISO/IEC 8859-1, with one key-value pair for each chunk. The "key" must be between 1 and 79 characters long. Separator is a null character. The "value" can be any length, including zero up to the maximum permissible chunk size minus the length of the keyword and separator. Neither "key" nor "value" can contain null character. Leading or trailing spaces are also disallowed.

tIME stores the time that the image was last changed.

tRNS contains transparency information. For indexed images, it stores alpha channel values for one or more palette entries. For truecolor and grayscale images, it stores a single pixel value that is to be regarded as fully transparent.

zTXt contains compressed text (and a compression method marker) with the same limits as tEXt.

The lowercase first letter in these chunks indicates that they are not needed for the PNG specification. The lowercase last letter in some chunks indicates that they are safe to copy, even if the application concerned does not understand them.