Google WebP image format now support lossless and transparency encoding

Google continues to enhance their own open source image format WebP.

The company has added support for lossless and transparency encoding.

Google developers spoke about the new updates in a blog posting:

Today, we introduce a new mode in WebP to compress images losslessly, and support for transparency – also known as alpha channel – in both the lossless and lossy modes. With these new modes, you can now use WebP to better compress all types of images on the web. Photographic images typically encoded as JPEG can be encoded in WebP lossy mode to achieve smaller file size. Icons and graphics can be encoded better in WebP lossless mode than in PNG. WebP lossy with alpha can be used to create transparent images that have minimal visual degradation, yet are much smaller in file size. Animations compressed as GIFs can use animation support in WebP.

Google WebP format is already supported in Google Chrome and Opera Browser. Google has added support for WebP in the Android Ice Cream Sandwich edition as well.