If you need an AVIF file in something that can actually edit it — Photoshop, GIMP, Affinity, a print template, an asset pipeline — PNG is the target that costs you nothing. It is lossless, so the conversion adds no new degradation, and it carries the alpha channel across intact.
The alpha channel comes with you
AVIF stores full 8-bit transparency, and so does PNG, so cut-outs, logos and anything with a soft or feathered edge convert cleanly. This matters more with AVIF than with most formats, because AVIF is heavily used for exactly this kind of asset on modern sites — product images floating on a coloured background, illustrations, icon sets. Convert one of those to JPEG and you permanently flatten it onto a solid rectangle.
Lossless from here, but not restored
PNG records the exact pixels it is given. If the AVIF was lossy — nearly all AVIF files on the web are — its compression artifacts become permanent pixel data in the PNG. Nothing is added and nothing further is lost. What you get is a stable master you can edit and re-save as many times as you like without any generation loss creeping in.
Colour depth is the one real caveat
AVIF can store 10 or 12 bits per colour channel, and HDR content in wide colour gamuts. The conversion here goes through your browser’s standard 8-bit sRGB pipeline, which is what almost every downstream tool expects. For ordinary images this is invisible. For an HDR photograph or a file with very smooth wide-gamut gradients, expect the result to look slightly flatter, and possibly to show mild banding where the original was perfectly smooth.
Be ready for the size increase
- AVIF is the most efficient still image format in common use; PNG is one of the least efficient for photographic content.
- A 200 KB AVIF photograph can easily become a 6 MB PNG. That is expected, not an error.
- Flat graphics and logos fare much better, sometimes growing only modestly, because PNG compresses solid colour well.
- If the destination is a web page rather than an editor, WebP will give you transparency at a fraction of PNG’s size.
Animated AVIF
AVIF can hold animation, being built on a video codec. Standard PNG cannot, so an animated AVIF converts to its first frame. There is no option that changes this.
The AVIF is decoded by your browser’s built-in decoder and re-encoded as PNG in this tab. No file is transmitted, so nothing about the image is visible to anyone but you.