PNGs use lossless compression, which offers high-quality images with more colours. They are also sometimes used for detailed graphs or diagrams online. This makes them perfect to use for company or brand logos or graphics that need to be placed in documents or over other images. However, unlike JPG, PNG files can have transparent or semi-transparent backgrounds around a design. Like JPG, PNG is a 2D ‘raster’ image format. The file extension PNG is short for ‘Portable Network Graphic’, and the format was created to offer improvements over the GIF format. This compression can affect quality, but this loss of quality isn’t noticeable to most users. JPG is a ‘lossy’ format, meaning that it is compressed to save storage space and make it easier to share. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, which is the name of the committee that standardised the format. However, you can usually adjust settings to save into other formats if needed.
Many cameras, smartphones, and basic photo or drawing programs will automatically save into JPG format. JPGs are 2D pixel-based ‘raster’ images, which makes them better for photographs or scans, rather than digital illustrations which are often better as ‘vector’ images. JPG is a universal format which can be opened by almost all image-viewing or -editing programs, by web browsers, and by certain other apps, and they’re supported by most devices. JPG, or JPEG, is one of the most widely used digital image formats.
