>After 20 years of stagnation, PNG is back with renewed vigor!
After 20 years of success, we can't resist the temptation to mess with what works.
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After 20 years of success, we can't resist the temptation to mess with what works.
It has, but WWW is still de facto sRGB, and will be for a long time still. But again, I'm not strictly opposed to evolving PNG, I just hope they don't ruin it in the process, because that's usually what happens when something gets update for a modern audience. I'll be watching with mixed optimism and concern.
The continued popularity of non-HDR 1080p screens on laptops is a bleak reminder that most people would rather save a couple hundred bucks than buy HDR capable hardware.
HDR is great for TVs and a nice-to-have on phones (who mostly get it for free because OLEDs are the norm these days), but display technology only advances as much as its availability in low-cost devices.
Not sure how HDR encoding works, but my impression is that you can set a nominal white point other than (1, 1, 1) in your specified colorspace. This is an extension, but orthogonal to specifying the colorspace itself and the gamut.
For example 16bit (integer) TIFF files 'with headroom', i.e. where some bits were used to represent data over 1.0 (HDR) was a common approach for VFX work in the 90's.
16bit float TIFF is also thing since 33 years. Adobe DNG is modeled after TIFF. High end offline renderers have traditionally been using TIFF (with mip-maps) to store textures.
TIFF supports tags so primaries and white point or a known color space name can be stored in the file.
The format is so versatile, it is used everywhere.
And of course it also supports indexed color, i.e. a non-negotiable feature at the time PNG was introduced.
PNG was meant to replace GIF. Instead of looking what was already there some group of "experts" and "enthusiasts" (quote Wikipedia) succumbed to their NIH complexes. If licensing/patent woes over compression algorithms had been a motivator, why not just add a new one to TIFF?
The fact that PNG stores straight/unpremultiplied alpha says everything if you know anything about imaging in computer graphics.
And the fact that the updated format spec just released didn't address this tells you everything you need to know about the group in charge of that, today.
PNG is the VHS of image formats. It should have never seen the light day of in the first place nor the adoption it did.
Yeah, I love the fact that you can embed a PDF file inside a TIFF.
But wide color gamut was already possibly in PNG via ICC profiles (HDR was not). And those primaries I showed could have been used in a wide color image.
So the image is a bit misleading or red-flag-y to experts who know. But to the average person, I think it is as truthful as I can be without getting too deep in the weeds.
> And the fact that the updated format spec just released didn't address this tells you everything you need to know about the group in charge of that, today.
What does it say? That they are naive or have the wrong priorities? Their rationale for this seems quite reasonable to me: https://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-Rationale.html#R.Non-premultiplied...