AVIF to PNG: for transparency, and for images you are going to edit
AVIF supports transparency, and most converters throw it away. Send a logo with clear corners through a careless tool and you get a white box behind it, or a black one. That is the main reason to pick PNG over JPG here: PNG has a real alpha channel, so a cut out arrives ready to drop onto a slide, a mockup or a product page.
The second reason is editing. PNG compression is lossless, so it stores the pixels it was handed and nothing more is thrown away. Convert to JPG instead and every later save adds artefacts on top of the ones already there. If the picture is heading into a design tool, or you will crop and re export it a few times, PNG costs you nothing on each round trip.
The transparency test, pixel by pixel
We built an AVIF with three vertical bands: one fully clear, one exactly half transparent, one fully opaque. Then we converted it at every setting on our own server and probed the output pixel by pixel.
| Setting | Clear area | Half transparent area | Opaque area |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recommended | stayed clear | stayed exactly half | stayed opaque |
| Smallest, 64 colours | stayed clear | stayed exactly half | stayed opaque |
| Palette compression off | stayed clear | stayed exactly half | stayed opaque |
Partial opacity survived even at 64 colours. That is the case most converters fail, because a palette has no obvious room for it, and the usual result is a soft shadow turning into a hard edge. Nothing is composited onto a background colour here at any setting. The same file sent through AVIF to JPG had its clear band filled with a solid colour, because JPEG has no way to store transparency at all.
Why we will not promise you a percentage
Palette compression is on by default, because a full colour PNG of a photograph is enormous and ordinary zlib barely dents it. How much it saves depends entirely on the picture. Here is that same 1200 by 900 AVIF, 21 KB on disk, converted at each setting:
| Setting | Palette | PNG out | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fast | 256 colours | 281 KB | full colour PNG kept, the palette version came out bigger |
| Recommended | 128 colours | 223 KB | palette used |
| Smallest | 64 colours | 197 KB | palette used |
| Palette compression off | none | 227 KB | strictly lossless, full colour |
On this particular image the palette saved almost nothing, and at 256 colours it would have made the file larger, so the tool threw it away and kept the full colour version. On a flat logo or a screenshot the same setting can cut the file by more than half. That is why no single percentage appears anywhere on this page. The only promise worth making is the one we can keep: you always receive whichever version is smaller, and the result tells you which one you got.
Expect the PNG to be several times the size of your AVIF
AVIF is a modern lossy codec allowed to discard detail your eye will not miss. PNG has to record every pixel it is given. A photograph that fits in a few hundred kilobytes as an AVIF runs into megabytes as a full colour PNG, and that is the price of losslessness rather than a fault in the conversion. If the PNG is still too heavy for what you need, the picture is probably a photograph, and AVIF to JPG is the better answer for it.
Screenshots and text stay sharp
Hard edges, interface text and flat blocks of colour are what JPEG handles worst. It works in small square blocks and leaves visible halos around every letter. PNG stores those edges exactly, so a screenshot converts with the text as crisp as the AVIF had it. Flat graphics are also where palette compression pays off most, because a screenshot or a logo genuinely contains few distinct colours. For a screenshot with gradients, where you want certainty rather than a saving, switch palette compression off and keep every colour.
Set the palette yourself
Under the compression setting there is a colours field. Leave it alone and each setting uses its own default. Set it anywhere from 2 to 256 and that is the palette you get, which is useful when you are matching an existing asset or squeezing an icon as far as it will go. Switching palette compression off entirely gives you a strictly pixel exact, full colour PNG.
Orientation, colour and dimensions
The orientation tag on a phone photo is applied before anything is written and then cleared from the output, so your picture arrives upright and no viewer turns it a second time. A wide gamut Display P3 profile is embedded in the PNG rather than dropped, which is the difference between accurate colour and skies that come back neon, and the Colour profile setting converts properly to sRGB when your destination ignores profiles. The pixel dimensions never change. This converts the format, not the size.
Renamed and animated files
The format is read from the file's own bytes, so an AVIF that someone saved under a .jpg name still converts correctly. An animated AVIF gives you its first frame as a single still, and the result says so. Animated PNG is not produced, because expanding an animation into hundreds of near identical frames is not what somebody converting one file is asking for.
What you get
- The transparent background kept whole, including partial opacity and soft shadows
- Lossless compression, so cropping and re exporting later costs nothing more
- Whichever is smaller, the palette version or the full colour one, decided per file
- Your own palette size when you want one, anywhere from 2 to 256 colours
- Photos upright, wide gamut colour kept or converted to sRGB on request
- The same pixel dimensions you started with, every time
What's next?
Is the picture an ordinary photograph with no transparency? AVIF to JPG will give you a much smaller file for the same image.
PNG heavier than you expected? Compress PNG reduces it further without touching the dimensions.
Putting the image back on a website afterwards? PNG to WebP keeps the transparency and cuts the weight for the browser.