Can Blender export to jpg XL? I can see jpg 2000 but that is not the same, or is it? Sorry, I my knowledge about file formats is rather lacking.
I often use 16bit png because i ussually don’t need 32 bit depth and 16 bit saves me a lot of hassle and time resulting from file sizes.
But it is true that png is slow which can be annoying when previewing sequences in VSE. And now everybody is saying that png isn’t all that great anyway. So, where can I get this fanatastic XL jpg which that solves all my lagging issues?
Ah yes, therein lies the caveat: Blender doesn’t export to this magical bitmap file format yet. You’d have to use an inbetween format, such as EXR. And open these in an image editor that does export to JPEG XL. (but avoid Photoshop for 16 bit images)
Nothing nice is ever easy, right?
I wonder if JPEG XL is in Blender’s wish list? Should check.
I mean, EXR didn’t allow to bake stuff like Color Management into the files when I set up my PNG workflow but wasn’t a setting introduced recently to allow that?
When I save a 16bit EXR from Blender it adds the colour profile info, and when I open the file in PhotoLine and assign the same profile, it is identical.
Then I save as a JPEG XL, and the result opened in IrfanView is identical to the original in Blender. 16bit.
Size of the lossless JPEG XL file is consistently smaller than any of the lossless EXR files.
Does anybody know if you can assign the color profile in Blenders VSE in that way as well? I basically need a format that i can save image sequences with applied color managment compositor effects like glare which I can import into VSE without going through other apps first. PNG does this but I am having trouble getting this to work with EXR.
I know that EXR is not meant to do this but perhaps there is some sort of awesome workaround.
Well, I can’t speak for what it will eventually be, but it’s far from “usable now”. It’s not supported by most applications (Windows Photos, Davinci, Blender, web browsers, etc.) GIMP just barely supports it but only 8-bit. It also didn’t work for my case, I got an error for JXL, TIFF (max size is apparently 4GB), JPEG, and EXR. PNG is the only one that appeared to save but either it didn’t encode properly (though I didn’t get an error) or it’s simply too large for photo viewers to open (which I suspicion as one of the viewers gave me an “Out of Memory” error trying to open it).
Basically, like I said, some of these file formats are useful for specific cases, but I have yet to find a good quality file format that is as widely usable and stable as PNG (JPEG is widely usable but garbage quality and no transparency). That’s why as a general rule I just use PNG, if PNG doesn’t work then I try another format, but PNG just works.
Yeah, although 16-bit still holds over 65k colors which is more than enough for 99% of use cases. With that many colors you can increase the contrast of an image by an insane amount and still not have to worry with color-banding.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a situation where 16-bit wasn’t enough.
When you export png or tiff you export it with view transform (filmic, agx, etc.). View transform is expected at the end of post-processing and the file is “done”, ready for posting. There’s no extra data in 16-bit because it was already transformed. It’s just more precise data, so you might get smoother gradients. In reality rarely the difference between 8 and 16-bit is noticable.
If you want more data you should edit renders before view transform. So do it in Blender compositor (View Transform happen at the end), or export exr and edit in linear workflow. For images there’s no difference between 16 and 32-bit and DWAA compression is ok until you are not doing extreme editing.
If you care you should use exr, if you don’t then 8-bit jpg/png is ok.
