alt Hacker NewsThere’s also data that isn’t needed in the final delivery format but is needed for editing. 8bit vs 16bit color for example. 8 bit is visually all you need for an image, but if you edit it to say being up the shadows, 8 bit will show banding because you’ve stretched it to the point the bands are visible. While 16bit has so much extra data it still looks perfect after being stretched.
JPEG XL is the ideal high end photography format. AVIF seems better for a space efficient web format.
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Evidlo • yesterday at 5:54 AM
Also the JXL decoder in Firefox and Chrome only returns 8 bits, unfortunately.
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Human eyes can quite reliably see greater than 8 bit color. While the eye is only able to differentiate about 10 million colors at any given brightness, because its sensitive to brightness in a logarithmic fashion the eye needs about 24 bits of per channel depth to see no banding.