Comment by mikae1
2 hours ago
> PNG, the lossless format is great for diagrams and stuff with sharp edges.
But also, like GIF, it's pointless when lossless WebP exists and is supported everywhere. It's more efficient. Lossy WebP does not make as much sense though since jpegli entered the game.
OP has made https://halide.cx/iris/ which could make lossy WebP make sense, but it's not open source or generally available.
> The new formats are interesting webp, avif, JXL and so on.
WebP was introduced 15 years ago. New relative to JPEG perhaps, but certainly not new.
PNGs will persist because I know that they're lossless by looking at the filename. When I hit File > Save as .png, I don't have to inspect output metadata (that image viewers don't expose) or play around with exporter settings.
It's unfortunate that we didn't give lossless webps a separate extension. Frankly I think even saving them as .png would've better than what we have now - people roughly understand that a .png is an image without artifacts, and any self-respecting image viewer will inspect magic bytes before opening a file anyways.
Being lossless is a function of the whole pipeline from an input image to an output image. The last step being encode to PNG doesn't guarantee anything about losslessness.
Lossless means that the file encodes the exact same information that was given to the encoder. This is a property of the format.
Well, you should enable Adam7 interlacing for nicer progressive decoding!
I suppose it's not very useful nowadays as most any image will load fast, though.