Well I know what you tell me: ‘Png? Serious Korben? We are in 2025 and do you tell us about the image format that comes from a time when we are still listening to Britney Spears on our CD readers?»Eh Bah imagine this good good Png format Those who slept quietly for 20 years have just woken up and apparently took vitamins during his sleep!
It is thanks to the W3C Timed Working Group Text that has been looking for a management solution HDR In his projects that all started. They told themselves ”What if we dust off this good old PNG a little?“And there we go to fast and furious mode with Adobe, Apple, Google, BBC and many other technological giants who have decided to transform this format today vintage (but still widely used) into a real modern racing animal.
So what is changing in that PNG third edition ? First official animation support! Yes, Apng (Animated PNG) that already existed, but who was a bit of a bizarre cousin who we did not create family meetings are now officially in a specification. No additional pixened GIF with their 256 colors in the miner era, make a path for 24 or 48 -bit animations with real alpha transparency.
The really great thing is that APNG remains completely compatible with classic PNG decoders. The first frame is stored as a normal PNG image, so even your old Internet Explorer 6 browser (if you are sufficiently masochistic to use it) can display something. This is called well thought out, not like some formats *cough* Webp *cough* Who forces you to repeat you again.
But wait, it’s not over because PNG now supports HDR (High dynamic range) with relatively intelligent implementation. While the second edition was limited to SDR (standard dynamic range), the new version includes CICP (coding independent code points), allowing to manage colorimetric spaces in a super compact way. In principle, with only 4 bytes plus standard PNG pieces, you can now display colors that will shout your retina on the HDR10 screen.
Metadata ExifThis means that this small information about the camera, focal length, GPS coordinates and whole trailes are now also officially supported. Previously, it was a little bazaar with every software that drummed in its corner. Now there is a very clean piece and even the orientation of the image (you know when your photo is upside down because you keep your phone anyway) is properly managed.
Note that Blink -based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Samsung Internet & Molder;), Firefox and Webkit (Safari) already support APNG. On iOS 9.0+, MacOS 10.11+ and TVOS 9.0+ is directly integrated into the bone.
Apple uses it even for animated stickers in iMessage! And Libpng library has been supporting CICP since version 1.6.45, so developers can talk to it.
For HDR metadata, we now also have Maxfall (maximum light light level) and Maxcll (maximum content level) that are required for HDR10 content. A piece of “Cllli” is only 8 bytes, because it is truly optimized for a small onion, suddenly, compared to certain modern formats that embark on tons of unnecessary metadata, it is a great art in terms of minimalism.
And the team behind this Renaissance PNG does not intend to stop there because they are already working on better HDR/SDR interoperability, have improved compression techniques (because good, even if PNG compresses well, we can always do better) and future editions to continue format.
In short, it’s great news for everyone. First, websites developers who will be able to use a format that they already know well with modern features, but also for designers who will have more flexibility, and eventually enjoy better pictures without having to install 50 bizarre codecs.
This new version of PNG shows that an existing standard can be modernized very well, rather than rediscovering the bike every 5 years with a new format that no one supports correctly.
It’s beautiful anyway!
Source
(Tagstotranslate) PNG