Why would you take a screenshot of a photo?
I for one welcome any progress for HDR in software. It’s still woefully behind on pretty much every platform. This is display technology invented 22 years ago that still doesn’t work properly in a million different cases. Actually smartphones have some of the best implementations for HDR right now, for some reason.
This is mainly for HDR video lol. And other content like HDR Android games if they exist…? Why tf would you take one of your own photos 😭
Also I assume this would be useful if you want to take a screenshot of an HDR photo on apps like Instagram where you can’t send the actual photo itself or don’t want to link someone to Zuck’s all-knowing algorithms.
In case the website wouldn’t let you save it. I don’t think the Instagram app allows you to save posted photos, for example.
It’s unclear why Google stuck with PNG for HDR screenshots instead of a format supported by Ultra HDR such as JPEG.
Because for good lossless HDR you’ve got a grand total of 2 options, PNG and JPEG XL. And Google don’t want people to know of yet another use case for JXL.
Google don’t want people to know of yet another use case for JXL.
Why’s that?
They really want to promote their AVIF format, and supporting JXL would hinder that (Since JXL is a much nicer upgrade path from JPEG/PNG than AVIF is)
Like you can transparently go from JPEG to JXL and back with no loss, which isn’t possible with AVIF. And PNG to JXL gives you a smaller file, while it’s usually the opposite with AVIF (Unless you get lucky, as lossless AVIF can be beaten by a BMP in a ZIP file). There’s also the issue of speed, AVIF is slow to encode compared to other formats (And while hardware decoding is possible, it’s also geared towards video, so the quality is often lacking, and can sometimes be slower than plain software encoding)
I’m not sure Google even knows. They killed it off in Chrome
Ironic, knowing that Google Research created it (together with Cloudinary).
That’s actually quite common in large companies, just recently I read this story:
Back then, there was close to zero collaboration between divisions at Microsoft […] In late 2013, my team was building Skype for Web, which we positioned as a competitor to Google Hangouts. We had a problem, though: in order to start a video or voice call, users needed to download a plugin which contained the required video codecs. We noticed Google Hangouts did the same on Internet Explorer and Firefox, but not on Chrome because the plugin was bundled with the browser for a frictionless experience. […] My team decided we had to offer the same frictionless experience on Microsoft’s latest browser, Edge, which was in development at the time. […] the team politely and firmly rejected bundling our plugin into the new Microsoft browser. The reason? Their KPI was to minimize the download size of the browser, and helping us would not help them reach that goal.
Makes sense
