All the modern video-derived formats (webp, heif/heic, avif) tend to be optimized for screen resolutions. But for print photography (including just plain old regular photography that wants to keep the option open of maybe printing some of the images eventually), the higher resolutions and higher quality stretches the limits of where those codecs actually perform well (in terms of file sizes, perceived quality, computational power of coding or decoding).

JPEG XL knocks the other modern images out of the water at those print resolutions and color spaces and quality. It's not just for photography, either: medical imaging, archiving, printing, etc., all use much higher resolutions that what is supported on any screen.

And perhaps most importantly for future support, the iPhone now supports taking images in JPEG XL. If that becomes a dominant format for photographic workflows, to replace stuff like DNG and other raw formats, browser support won't hold back the format's adoption.

[–] calisti@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Thanks for the iPhone hint! Do you happen to know or have an idea why Apple chose to offer JPEG XL only as ProRaw format? For “normal” photo capture, they still use HEIC only.

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think HEIC plays friendly for how they store live photos: a container that has both a still image and a video of the surrounding time context. HEIC for the still photo and HEVC for the video probably optimizes the hardware acceleration for fast, low power processing of both parts of the data, and allows for a higher quality extraction of an alternative still photo from a different part of the video.

And maybe they want to have more third party support in place before they set JXL as a default. All the power and space savings in the world on capture might not mean as much if the phone has to do the work of exporting a JPEG or HEIC for each time that file interfaces with an app or the browser or whatever.

[–] calisti@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 week ago

Makes sense. Thanks for your knowledgeable response!