JPEG XL?

[jch2103]

I recently discovered that there's a new image format variation of JPEG: JPEG XL https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/ and https://cloudinary.com/blog/the-case-for-jpeg-xl. It supposedly has many advantages over 'old' JPEG, and is royalty-free. I haven't seen any examples in the wild, but I suppose they will emerge soon. Any plans to incorporate this into IM?

[Lukas52]

Seems like a alternative to the webp format. It indeed has some nice features (especially if you focus more on quality).
Given webp adoption (and the fact its free as well) this might surfaced a little to late

I will be rooting for JPEG XL tho, since most places that have adapted webp just seem to use it as an excuse to compliantly dump picture quality in favor of page load times...

[Mario]

IMatch 2023 supports JPGXL as a native format. It can index JPGXL files, ExifTool and read/write XML/EXIF as far as I know.

Currently there is no support for rendering/displaying JPGXL images.

Windows does not support them (no WIC codec yet).
None of the 3rd party image libraries I use do support them (yet).

A WIC codcec written by a programmer is available on GitHub and there is sample code from the JPG group also available on GitHub.
But before I sit down and learn all this stuff and try to roll my own implementation for JPGXL, I want to see if there is any real demand.

The hyped JPEG2000 format, the WebP formats, the expensive patent nightmare HEIC/HEIF from Apple/Nokia etc. never got any real traction. HEIC/HEIF works on Apple devices, but not so much outside of Apple's walled garden. Mostly a tool for Apple to get away with less memory in their devices to increase the profit margin. And an additional thing to lock in their users.

Most devices these days have plenty of disk space, so saving 20% is not really that important.
For cloud and search engine providers like Google or Microsoft this may be more relevant. They scan and index basically every image ever posted on the internet, saving 20% on disk space will increase their profit because they can get away with buying less disk space.

As I said, IMatch 2023 knows about JXL files and indexes them. If Microsoft makes a WIC codec available for Windows 11, IMatch will automatically use it. If Microsoft does not make available a WIC codec for JPGXL, I would see this as an indicator that it is just not important. If there is sufficient demand from the IMatch user base to support JPGXL I will look into rolling my own support for it.

[Lukas52]

Webp is all around the web and growing daily! But as i mentioned above most of the people using it apparently don't browse there own websites because they way overdo it in terms of bandwidth savings...
More and more CDNs (Back-ends for serving Media content on larger websites) have either switched already or are in the process of switching. Sometimes it is an actual gain. Better Pictures for the same bandwidth? I take that. Crappy Images because someone colorblind "optimized" the settings to about 50% original size to save a penny, not so much...

But i guess it doesn't make much sense for Photography use, since as Mario pointed out Storage is cheap enough so nobody really cares about saving 20% on already fairly lightweight image content.

Its great to speed up thumbnail loading tho.

I am still waiting for animated pngs to become more of a thing, or some other proper replacement for GIFs

[Mario]

IMatch supports WebP for quite some time.
But this was really designed mainly to conserve storage space for cloud providers and to reduce traffic for CDNs. Not for retaining image quality for compressing. WEBP is not a format you often encounter in photographic workflows or in DAM contexts where image quality matters.

[sinus]

Webp is all around the web and growing daily! 
...

Growing daily ... could be, but I think, on a very low level. 

And JPEG XL, I have seen lately something like this: " 

Google will phase out JPEG XL from Chromium. The format has been supported from February 2022 onwards, but Google reportedly sees too little interest in the ecosystem to continue maintaining the standard."

Just my 2cents

[bekesizl]

We will see how it evolves in the future.
Affinity Photo V2 has support for it.
According following site it is possible to transcode an existing JPG file to JXL lossless. https://jpegxl.info/
It supports higher bitrates (HDR).

Looks interesting and very good, that the following IMatch version will at least have support for this format on the metadata level.

[thrinn]

According following site it is possible to transcode an existing JPG file to JXL lossless. https://jpegxl.info/
It supports higher bitrates (HDR).

But why should we do something like this? If the source is a regular JPG, the picture has already lost details and color depth. These will not reappear by just converting it to another format.
And overall, support seems to be a bit shaky at the moment. According to the cited web site, there is e.g. no support in Photoshop. But if it gets some more traction, great!

[Mario]

From https://www.techzine.eu/news/applications/93077/google-ends-support-for-jpeg-xl-in-chromium/

Google listed various reasons for discontinuing JPEG XL support in the Chromium browser. The tech giant argues that there is little interest from the ecosystem in continuing to experiment with JPEG XL. Furthermore, the new format doesn't offer enough advantages over existing image formats to accept it as a standard. Removing the format will make maintaining Chromium easier.


According to The Register, the decision is also legal in nature. In February of this year, Microsoft obtained the patent for the basic technology for JPEG XL, despite the fact that the patent application was in an earlier stage and many industry professionals disagreed with Microsoft's acquisition of the patent.

So, this might be yet another of those dead end formats like JPEG 2000. We'll see.
I keep my RAWs, everything in-between lossless (PSD) and produce outputs for print and web as needed. Compared to the size of my RAW files, the resulting JPEGs after processing are very small already

[sinus]

Formats such as jpeg, tif, psd, png are still widely used.
Plus, of course, different raws for many photographers.

I also, like Mario, keep my raws (nef) and almost all my copies are mainly jpegs and less tiffs.

I think that's still a safe bet for many years. I'm sceptical about new formats, because so many new and promising ones have come out and then disappeared again.

And by the way, from my personal point of view, when people talk about losses with jpeg, that is of course correct. But in the vast majority of cases this loss is unimportant, because even with relatively high-quality magazine printing you will almost never notice a difference.

I have done various tests with printing on photo paper, book printing, magazine printing (A4 title) and compared tiffs with jpgs. I have never been able to see a difference when printing, except of course when you enlarge an image extremely, especially with areas you then start to see something. Also in Photoshop you need a big enlargement (and/or calibrated monitors regarding colours) to see real differences.

That's why I still find jpeg very good, even when saving several times.
And just in case, I still have the raws. 

[ubacher]

I recently looked also into these new/alternate formats. I am not trying to save space - I like to have better quality at
the same used diskspace.
But as Thrinn says:
But why should we do something like this? If the source is a regular JPG, the picture has already lost details and color depth. These will not reappear by just converting it to another format.

The key, in my mind, is then: will photoshop raw converter allow output in the new format.  Up to now it does not.
(Have I read somewhere that on a Mac ACR can output HEIF?)