I have a compressed PNG image compressed.png. I can convert it to an uncompressed PNG decompressed.png using GIMP (saving as PNG and setting compression level to 0). How can this be done on the command line (Linux)?
I recall doing this in the past using Imagemagick's convert, but I forgot how. I tried some things that I thought should work based on the documentation:
convert compressed.png -compress None decompressed.pngconvert compressed.png +compress decompressed.pngconvert compressed.png -quality 0 decompressed.pngconvert compressed.png -quality 00 decompressed.png
just wrote an ordinary compressed PNG.
Aside: why would you want an uncompressed PNG?
Some cases:
- You want to support efficient (binary) diffs of the image data, while still using other features of the PNG format (as opposed to storing raw image data or BMP).
- You want to compress several PNGs together in a tarball or 7z archive, but want to keep using PNG features. If the images are sufficiently similar this can give a better compression ratio than compressing individually.
- Useful as a baseline size for testing PNG optimizers.
3 Answers
ImageMagick will always compress PNG files. The worst compression you can get is using:
convert -verbose -quality 01 input.png output.pngbut it depends on the image content (the 0 will use Huffman compression which sometimes compress better than zlib).
You can try other tools like pngcrush () to disable the compression:
pngcrush -force -m 1 -l 0 input.png output.pngwhich create a file the same size GIMP create when using Compression Level 0 (few bytes more or less).
Some example sizes (for a photographic PNG, 1600x1200):
- original: 1,693,848 bytes.
- after IM: 2,435,983 bytes.
- after GIMP: 5,770,587 bytes.
- after pngcrush: 5,802,254 bytes.
To quote the ImageMagick doc: Not all combinations of compression level, strategy, and PNG filter type can be obtained using the -quality option. For more precise control, you can use the -define option.
For example, this command should create an uncompressed (RGB) PNG file:
convert INFILE \
-define png:compression-level=0 \
-define png:compression-filter=0 \
-define png:color-type=2 \
OUTFILE.pngYou might get a warning, which is a harmless bug. It will still produce a correct png.
Sample image:
112233 112233 112233 112233
445566 445566 445566 445566
778899 778899 778899 778899
aabbcc aabbcc aabbcc aabbccIDAT chunk of the PNG file created with IM:
49444154081d013400cbff00
11223311223311223311223300
44556644556644556644556600
77889977889977889977889900
aabbccaabbccaabbccaabbcc
7d6f14b9...However, for certain cases (e.g. group compression) it could be worthwhile testing a format with less overhead, for example TARGA (.tga).
5I like the netpbm suite of tools, it is designed in the UNIX "software tools" tradition: "write programs that do one thing and do it well".
You can do what you asked like this:
< in.png pngtopnm > image.pnm
< in.png pngtopnm -alpha > alpha.pnm
<image.pnm pnmtopng -alpha alpha.pnm -compression 0 > out.png
rm image.pnm alpha.pnmYou might lose certain metadata from the original png file.
It seems a bit complicated, due to the way we handle the alpha channel.
Netpbm is a toolkit for manipulation of graphic images, including conversion of images between a variety of different formats. There are over 220 separate tools in the package including converters for more than 80 graphics formats.
