| Format introduction | Truevision TGA, often referred to as TARGA, is a raster graphics file format created by Truevision Inc. It was the native format of TARGA and VISTA boards, which were the first graphic cards for IBM-compatible PCs to support Highcolor/truecolor display. | Portable Network Graphics (PNG) 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 used lossless image compression format on the Internet. 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. |
| Technical details | The format can store image data with the maximum 24 bits of RGB and an extra 8-bit alpha channel. Color data can be color-mapped, or in direct color or truecolor format. Image data may be stored raw, or optionally, a lossless RLE compression similar to PackBits can be employed. | PNG supports palette-based images (with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), grayscale images (with or without alpha channel), and full-color non-palette-based RGB[A] 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. |
| File extension | .tga | .png |
| MIME | image/x-targa, image/x-tga | image/png |
| Developed by | Truevision | PNG Development Group |
| Type of format | Raster image file | lossless bitmap image format |
| Associated programs | Adobe Photoshop, Corel's Photo-Paint and Paint Shop Pro, the GIMP, GraphicConverter, Helicon Filter, ImageMagick, Inkscape, IrfanView, Pixel image editor, Paint.NET and Xara Photo & Graphic Designer and many others. | Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, the GIMP, GraphicConverter, Helicon Filter, ImageMagick, Inkscape, IrfanView, Pixel image editor, Paint.NET, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer. |
| Wiki | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truevision_TGA | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics |