It's great to see that AVIF support is coming to Photoshop!
There is another modern file format which would be very helpful to have in Photoshop: JPEG XL (ie "JXL" file extension). While it currently lacks the high degree of browser support offered by AVIF, it otherwise offers many benefits over AVIF which are useful for a variety of uses:
- JXL supports up to 32-bit depth (vs maximum 12 for AVIF). This makes it much more suitable for an image which is intended to undergo further editing.
- JXL offers effectively unlimited pixel dimensions, while AVIF has significant constraints for full resolution images (tiling can expand these limits, but with some risks at the edges and I've seen some tiled AVIF images open up as if they were 13 different photos).
This makes JXL a much more attractive file format for sending images to a print lab than AVIF, JPG, or TIF. It offers very high quality/resolution in a very small file.
Assuming browser support grows, JXL would also offer these additional benefits:
- JXL supports progressive decoding, so that you can see a decent version of the image much when viewing over a slow connection.
- JPG images may be recompressed to JXL with no further loss of quality. This makes it very easy to significantly improve website performance (with no impact to image quality).
There are additional benefits to JXL, as detailed here. Like AVIF, JXL supports high quality in small files, transparency, HDR, and more. With the benefits above for both print and web, JXL would also offer simplicity as a single file format could be used in an optimal way for a much wider range of uses.
Note: LR and ACR already support JXL exports That is great, but ACR does not offer a simple and efficient export workflow, many people use PS and not LR, and PS support enables much more powerful workflows (actions, scripts, panels, etc may all help process images and export JXL if there were support). So adding support to PS as well would be very valuable.
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