AVIF to PNG

The deciding factor between this and converting to JPG is almost always transparency. AVIF carries a full alpha channel, and if you convert to JPG that transparency has to be destroyed and replaced with a solid fill. PNG keeps it, which matters for logos, product cut-outs, icons and anything intended to sit on a background you do not control. The second factor is editing. PNG is lossless, so once converted you can crop, retouch and re-save as many times as you like without accumulating compression damage — something neither AVIF nor JPG can offer. The cost is size: PNG stores everything, and an AVIF that was a few hundred kilobytes can easily become several megabytes as a PNG. That is a fair price for a master file and a poor one for a web asset.

AVIF is one of the most efficient formats in existence and PNG is one of the least; converting between them can multiply the file size by five or ten times. Nothing has malfunctioned when this happens. Think of the PNG as a working copy rather than something to publish — if you need it on a web page afterwards, convert it onward to WebP, which will keep the transparency at a fraction of PNG's weight.

Both formats store 8-bit alpha, so semi-transparent pixels stay semi-transparent. Soft shadows, feathered edges and anti-aliased text all survive without a halo or a matte line. There is no background colour to choose here, because nothing needs filling in — which is precisely the advantage over converting to JPG.

AVIF can store high dynamic range and a wide colour gamut. PNG in common use cannot, and the browser tone-maps the image down to standard range as it decodes. For most images this is invisible; for a deliberately HDR photograph with very bright highlights it can look flatter than the original. This happens at the decode step, so it applies whatever you convert to.

AVIF wraps the royalty-free AV1 video codec into a still-image format, and it compresses harder than anything else in mainstream use — frequently half the size of a JPG at matched quality, with transparency and high dynamic range on top. Browsers decode it well (Chrome since 85, Firefox since 93, Safari since 16.4), but support thins out fast beyond them: many image editors, older operating systems and most print workflows still cannot open one.

PNG is a lossless format built in 1996 as a patent-free replacement for GIF. Nothing is discarded when it compresses, so an image can be opened and re-saved indefinitely without degrading, and it carries a full alpha channel for soft-edged transparency. That fidelity costs space: a photograph stored as PNG is typically several times larger than the same photo as JPG, which is why PNG is the right choice for screenshots, logos and line art rather than camera output.