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Common Graphic File Formats for Images

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== PNG: Portable Network Graphics Format ==Introduced in 1995 as a free alternative to Unisys's greedy patent claim on the GIF format, PNG was slow to be adopted by companies like Microsoft so the format did not catch on right away.  Today PNG is supported by all the major web browsers.  PNG uses deflate compression and is sometimes preprocessed in a way that helps it compress better.A PNG stream consists of a number of data chunks. Each chunk stores its type and size, then follows the chunk data, then a CRC-32 checksum value. PNG image types are Grayscale, with 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 bits per sample, RGB truecolor, with 24 or 48 bits per pixel, Paletted, with 1, 2, 4 or 8 bits per pixel.  Like GIF, the PNG format supports transparency.  Howevever, unlike GIF, PNG can do it on truecolor images.  Both grayscale and truecolor can store an alpha channel which contains transparency information.== TIF / TIFF: Tagged Image File Format ==This graphics format is more complex than most, allowing for different types of compression and designed to be extensible.  Most of the time a TIF uses lossless compression, however, it is possible to save a TIF using a lossy compression type, even a JPEG bitstream.  A TIFF file may also be saved "uncompressed" making the file size large, like a bitmap.  When compressed, the most common compression types use are: LZW Compression, bilevel fax/CCITT 3, Huffman Encoding, or Packbits.TIFF, the Tagged Image File Format was designed by the companies Aldus and Microsoft in the 1980s to store pixel image data.  Due to all of the variances in format and compression type, no known single image software is capable of reading all valid TIFF files, however, it is rare that you will encounter a TIF file of one of the more obscure formats.
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