Comment by ezst
1 day ago
Having lived through the MP3 era and experienced the many years/decades? that it took for experts across fields to come together and figure out LAME and the bag of parameters that ultimately made it better than most audio formats around it, I would lean towards waiting this one out, and not take any announcement of a "winner" as gospel. We've yet to see the codecs mature and refine for some time.
I also remember the big claims about WebP's superiority, which ended-up in practice, at equivalent file-size, mostly trading away some of the JPEG artifacts that we all know for some unusual new ones.
I don't think there's a large-enough margin in this space that a new format could chew into to make the general public care: image compression seems like a solved problem overall. The second best thing is to come-up with a format that can make the content producers not have to care either, i.e. be the best in class or close-enough in a variety of use-cases (lossy, lossless, fast, animated, hdr, progressive, …). My naive impression was that jxl is mostly interesting in that regard.
Regarding real-world use of WebP - what makes it much worse, in my experience, is that so many web servers are set up to do a lossy conversion to WebP from the original file, most often JPEG (to cut down on bandwidth, or just to satisfy a web speed report originating from Google and therefore pushing Google's technologies). The difference is often very noticeable, e.g. textures smoothed out of existence. Helps to remove WebP from the Accepts header to force servers to serve the original.
It means the technical differences between format, and the real-world choice of which file you want, don't match.
Which is a big advantage jpegxl has over avif. You can convert existing jpegs to smaller jpegxls without losing any data.
> Helps to remove WebP from the Accepts header to force servers to serve the original.
I have tried doing that with curl/wget but have been unsuccessful, websites still serve webp even when the original URL ends with .jpg or .png... Could you explain how you do it?
Sorry for the late response. I did it in Firefox 115 ESR by setting "image.webp.enabled" to false in about:config. I just looked in there to get the exact name, using latest Firefox, and realised they've removed it. Next time I want it I'll have to look into browser extensions - looks like some don't work anymore - or stick to using the older browser for now for some sites.
If you're sure cURL is sending the Accept header correctly without WebP, e.g. just "Accept: image/png,image/jpeg" (note my error in my earlier post, it's Accept not Accepts), and the server is still serving WebP, then it's misconfigured and there may be nothing you can do, short of swearing at it.
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> I don't think there's a large-enough margin in this space that a new format could chew into to make the general public care
What improvement do you think is necessary for people to care?
Genuinely curious. Spoiler link with my answer to avoid any bias: https://lgms.nl/p/cau/?b64&ZVRNb9QwEL0j9T%2BMKqFtpe1Cqcq9qoT...
you and me are enthusiasts, we love to know about codecs, formats, and we spontaneously seek novelty in this field and engage with it (I have similar stories of amazement about opus, I even went quite deep the rabbit hole of writing a java decoder implementation for it just to study it). But most people won't get nearly that excited, unless a new format magically enables something like twice the compression performance (so people start spreading the word that they can e.g. buy their next smartphone with 128GB storage and not the 256GB version and enjoy the same capabilities). Anything less than that will be a rounding error and barely perceptible, not worthy of the attention, and definitely not of the time to re-process and massively convert prior content.
Another interesting niche is in between JPEG and RAW. RAW files are a pain to deal with, but editing JPEGs can be problematic due to bit depth and whatnot. Personally I just want to shoot pictures and not edit/convert/whatever, but sometimes I have a shot that could benefit from a bit of adjustment, and that's where even large JPEGs have an issue. Bit depth and whatever isn't suitable.
> RAW files are a pain to deal with,
RAW can be it's own entire nasty^nasty rabbit hole. The sorts of stuff that honestly do make me wonder if certain raw formats have their own unique ways of exposing vulnerabilities in accepted ways of implementing.
Things that come to mind are;
- Compressed RAW images. Both the lossless and lossy variants, esp because every manufacturer does their own thing, well except maybe MFT[0], buuuut;
-For MFT, my understanding is that the RAW doesn't just contain some info for LR/C1/DPL[1] or any other sufficiently implemented processing tool to apply correction data (again, I could be wrong, but I think that is something that the Micro 4/3 format does.)
[0] - Micro 4/3
[1] Light room, Capture One, DXO PhotoLab (FKA DXO OpticsPro)
I'd say I'm rather well-versed in this topic but I have a really hard time following what you're saying. Could you attempt rephrasing?
MFT is a sensor size and lens mount, not a raw file format. Panasonic and Olympus (among others) have made cameras using this standard, but use different raw file formats.
some of the pain of RAW is mitigated with good workflow. shoot RAW+JPEG and when culling, delete the RAWs you won’t edit. keep RAWs for any outstanding shots. that clears up a large proportion of the issues.
JPEG engines are getting better and more configurable (Fuji recipes, LUTs on Panasonic) which makes this workflow more viable.
what i’d love is a good intermediary archival format that is more space efficient than RAW while keeping more editing latitude than a JPEG. using a dynamic preserving tone curve like Log in 14 bits and compressing it losslessly. although i wonder if that would be much better than compressed DNGs.
the main thing with jpeg is adding 10bit would be a breaking change anyway, and storage space on phones gets you 30-40% more photos on the same storage if you change formats.