The new AVIF image format.

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Ockie

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Hi guys. Thought this might apply to you photographer guys. Will this new AVIF format make a difference in your life, or do you guys work with lossless raw files? Below is just a sample that I have played around with. Found a site that converts to AVIF. Just used a old pic of when I was in Houtbaai many moons ago. It was taken with a little digital camera. First one is original Jpeg one and one on top is AVIF converted file. Original size is 484KB and AVIF is 332KB. Can you guys spot any degradation. I cant see any loss, but my eyes are not trained for such detail....so thought I would post it here. This is a new codec, so sure improvements will still be made before it becomes fully commercial. Also, the conversion website does not allow you to play with settings, so not sure how much compression it is set to apply.

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AVIF is the AV1 video format in an HEIF container. It also does still images, as you have demonstrated. This format has a lot of potential: https://netflixtechblog.com/avif-for-next-generation-image-coding-b1d75675fe4

The playback/display of the format has wide support. The drawback for photographers is that there is very limited support from the photo editing software. It seems like Darktable and Gimp support it, but not much else.
 
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Chrome 85 introduces support for decoding AVIF content natively. This “next-generation image format” has been standardized by the Alliance for Open Media, like AV1 for video. Google identifies three improvements:

  • Reducing bandwidth consumption to load pages faster and reduce overall data consumption. AVIF offers significant file size reduction for images compared with JPEG or WebP.
  • Adding HDR color support. AVIF is a path to HDR image support for the web. JPEG is limited in practice to 8-bit color depth. With displays increasingly capable of higher brightness, color bit depth, and color gamuts, web stakeholders are increasingly interested in preserving image data that is lost with JPEG.
  • Supporting ecosystem interest. Companies with a large web presence have expressed an interest in shipping AVIF images on the web.
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Yes, the compression artifacts are a bit more noticeable if you zoom in.
That said, the jpeg quality was not that great already. I only see any artifacts on my images at about 250%, whereas yours display it at 100%.

For a better comparison, you should compare compression with jpg and avif from a lossles source.
 
Ockie said:
Hi guys. Thought this might apply to you photographer guys. Will this new AVIF format make a difference in your life, or do you guys work with lossless raw files? Below is just a sample that I have played around with. Found a site that converts to AVIF. Just used a old pic of when I was in Houtbaai many moons ago. It was taken with a little digital camera. First one is original Jpeg one and one on top is AVIF converted file. Original size is 484KB and AVIF is 332KB. Can you guys spot any degradation. I cant see any loss, but my eyes are not trained for such detail....so thought I would post it here. This is a new codec, so sure improvements will still be made before it becomes fully commercial. Also, the conversion website does not allow you to play with settings, so not sure how much compression it is set to apply.

View attachment 890682
Click to expand...
You're going to lose quality as you're converting from a source that already shows loss.

There have been a lot of better codecs for images for a while now, e.g. webp, hoping avif will bring some change, all depends on browsers and adobe support (they only support webp through a plugin if I remember correctly, they do support HEIC but basically no one (besides Apple) uses that due to patents).

Here's the Netflix blog on AVIF if you're interested: https://netflixtechblog.com/avif-for-next-generation-image-coding-b1d75675fe4

The only reason I see everyone starting to move to AVIF is when HDR monitors start becoming more available:
At Netflix, we are also working on HDR images for the UI and are planning to use AVIF for encoding these HDR image assets.
Click to expand...

JPEG will take a very, very long time to die off.
 
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