Animation, compression, transparency – all in one format

ImageConverter Plus probably supports the largest possible number of all the existing image formats. It is good for advanced users, but may be confusing for beginners. GIF is the format that everyone knows of – it is the only one that supports animation, so everyone comes across this format once in a while. GIF is an old format – it was developed in 1987 specifically for the web, but it is still very popular, because image size is relatively small compared to other image compression types. It supports LZW compression, which helps for the image quality to be preserved after decreasing the file size. GIF is palette based: although any color can be one of millions of shades, the maximum number of colors available for each frame is 256 which seemed reasonable at the time of GIF's creation because few people had the hardware to display more. Interlacing is another web-specific feature of GIF. It is a mechanism that makes images appear faster on-screen by first displaying the initial version of the image and gradually showing the full version. GIF allows transparent pixels. The transparency feature allows a graphic designer to designate the background of the image transparent. GIF format is used for typical line drawings, cartoons, grayscale photographs, and similar graphics that need only 256 colors. ImageConverter Plus provides comprehensive support for this format. You can save images in GIF and convert GIF images into a variety of other file types.