GIF, PNG-8 or PNG-24: Really what’s the difference?
The PNG format (pronounced “ping”) is similar to the GIF format in that it supports transparency and works best with solid-color images, but it is superior to the GIF format as it has the ability to support true levels of transparency for colored areas. PNGs can also produce a better quality image at a smaller file size than can GIFs.
Photoshop allows you to save an image as a PNG-8 file or a PNG-24 file but what is the difference between a PNG-8 and a PNG-24?
- PNG-8 is shorthand for “8-bit PNG,” but more generally it refers to palette-based PNG images with 1-, 2-, 4- or 8-bit pixels. That is, each pixel value in the image itself is 8 (or fewer) bits deep, and it acts as an index to a particular 24-bit RGB color value in the palette.
- PNG-24, on the other hand, is shorthand for “24-bit PNG” and refers to RGB (red/green/blue) images. Each pixel in such images is 24 bits (3 bytes) deep and directly specifies a colour instead of acting as an index into a lookup table of colours (i.e., a palette). These images thus can contain up to 16.8 million colors, although typical ones tend to use no more than 50,000 or so.
I hope you find this information helpful and answers any of those nagging queries you have next time your saving that file for use on the web.











