How to convert PNG to PBM
- Add your .PNG file - drop it in the box above or click to browse.
- Convert it to .PBM in a few seconds.
- Download your new .PBM file.
What to expect
- All colour and grayscale information is discarded - the output is strictly black and white, so photographs come out as high-contrast or dithered line art.
- PNG transparency has no equivalent in PBM and is dropped; transparent areas are rendered as black or white.
- PBM is uncompressed; the binary (P4) form is much smaller than the ASCII (P1) form for the same image.
Frequently asked questions
What happens to my image when PNG becomes PBM?
PBM is a 1-bit black-and-white (bi-level) format, so every pixel is reduced to pure black or pure white. All colour and all shades of grey in the PNG are lost, typically via thresholding or dithering.
Why convert a PNG to PBM?
PBM is used where a simple, fully-documented bi-level bitmap is needed - for example feeding images into Netpbm tooling or pipelines that expect line-art or mask data rather than photographs.
What opens a PBM file?
Free image tools such as GIMP, IrfanView, and XnView MP read PBM, as does the Netpbm toolkit. Because it is an uncompressed niche format, most everyday viewers handle PNG more readily, so convert back to PNG for general sharing.
Will the PBM be larger than the PNG?
Not usually, because PBM stores just one bit per pixel. However PBM is uncompressed, so for large images the binary P4 variant is far more compact than the plain-text P1 variant.
Programs that convert PNG: Picture Resize Free Online Images Converter · Adobe Photoshop · FastPictureViewer Professional · PhotoFiltre Studio · PolyTrans|CAD+DCC · Ability Photopaint · Adobe Photoshop for Mac · XnConvert
