Novus Convert
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Image format

PPM converter

A .ppm file is a Portable Pixmap: a full-colour image storing three samples — red, green and blue — per pixel, with the maximum channel value declared in the header. It is the top rung of the Netpbm ladder and the most commonly encountered of the three.

Private for supported formats — processed in your browser

Convert supported files

Runs on your device

Drop PPM files here

Batch files can each use a different output. Nothing uploads for local conversions.

Working inputs include camera RAW, browser-local audio/video, PDF, CBZ/CBR comics, office documents, ebooks, markup, 3D models, structured text, images, and archives.

Where PPM comes from

PPM completed Poskanzer's 1988 pbmplus trio and became the lingua franca of Unix image pipelines: decode anything to PPM, pipe it through a filter, encode it to anything else. That role faded as libraries replaced pipes, but PPM remains the default intermediate for renderers, ray tracers and teaching projects, because writing one requires no dependency at all.

How PPM works

  • P3 stores RGB samples as whitespace-separated ASCII integers; P6 stores them as interleaved raw bytes.
  • Samples are interleaved per pixel — R, G, B, R, G, B — rather than stored as separate channel planes.
  • The declared maximum value sets the scale; values above 255 use two bytes per sample, big-endian.
  • There is no alpha channel, so transparency cannot be represented at all.
  • Colour values carry no colour-space declaration and are conventionally treated as sRGB without any guarantee.

When to use PPM

  • Output from ray tracers and renderers that want no encoding dependency
  • Intermediate frames in a processing pipeline where re-compression would accumulate loss
  • Teaching and testing, since the ASCII form can be inspected in a text editor
  • Interchange with scientific tooling that expects raw interleaved samples

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Full colour with no compression artefacts and no codec to implement
  • Supports 16 bits per channel
  • Readable and writable in a few lines of code in any language

Limitations

  • Completely uncompressed — typically several times the size of an equivalent PNG
  • No alpha channel
  • No colour-space declaration, so colour accuracy rests on an assumption
  • Not displayable in a browser

Compatibility

Read by ImageMagick, GIMP, OpenCV, Netpbm and most scientific imaging software; not by browsers or consumer viewers. Novus Convert decodes both the ASCII and binary forms locally, honours the declared maximum value, and converts to PNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF and the other raster targets for delivery.

None beyond header comments. No ICC profile, no EXIF, no orientation flag — colour is interpreted as sRGB by convention rather than by declaration.

Convert PPM to another format

Convert other formats to PPM