810
PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
810 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
72362 readers
2934 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That depends. Something like HDR should be able to fall back to non-HDR since it largely just adds data, so if the format specifies that extra information is ignored, there's a chance it works fine.
I'm not sure you can turn an hdr image into a regular one just by snipping it down to 8 bits per channel and discarding the rest.
I mean it would work but I'm not certain you'll get the best results.
And that's probably enough. I don't know enough about HDR to know if it would look anything like the artist imagined, but as long as it's close enough, it's fine if it's not optimal. Having things completely break is far less than ideal.
You'd probably get some colours that end up being quite off target. But you'll get an image to display. So in the end it depends on how much "not optimal" you're ready to accept.
Right, and it depends on what "quite off target" means. Are we talking about greens becoming purples? Or dark greens becoming bright greens? If the image is still mostly recognizable, just with poor saturation or contrast or whatever, I think it's acceptable for older software.
So it depends on the specific HDR encoding used, Rec2020 is the most common ones you'll see (It's meant for "pure" setups, i.e. where the source and output are tightly linked, e.g. gaming consoles or blu-ray, or so) and the raw data won't look great. While something like HLG (Hybrid-Log Gamma) is designed for better fallback (As it's meant for TV broadcast, where the output device is "whatever TV the user has"), so should just look dimmer.
This is a HDR screenshot I took of Destiny 2, which uses Rec2020, tone mapped to SDR
And here's the raw screenshot data from before tonemapping.
If the second image had all the right HDR metadata, and the viewer supported it properly, then both images would match.
I see, but the animation feature cant be compatiable no?
Likely, you'll see the first frame only on older software. Encoding animation in a dedicated animation chunk and using the base spec for the first keyframe sounds like the sane thing to do, so they likely did that.
I'm not going to look into it now, because I would then have to implement it. :D
Haha dont worry, just curious. Your answer is good!