Pleasantly surprised.
I did skim through the specs, it seems most of it is related to cleanup and optional blocks, so it seems PNG is still safe, am I wrong? (asking those who did dive into the new specs deeply).
Is this written exactly for (1) people who implement/maintain this and, I say this with love, (2) nerds. Or will there be effects outside of a microscopic improvement on storage + latency.
PNG was a huge deal when it was new, mostly because of all the headaches Unisys was giving everyone over GIF compression patents. This new standard is mostly of interest to people that have reason to care about what format their image data is in.
PNG is popular with some Commercial Application developers, but the exposure and color problems still look 1980's awful in some use-cases.
Even after spending a few grand on seats for a project, one still gets arrogant 3D clown-ware vendors telling people how they should run their pipeline with PNG hot garbage as input.
People should choose EXR more often, and pick a consistent color standard. PNG does not need yet another awful encoding option. =3
A very basic rec.709 workflow tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf8COHAgHJs
The Andreas Dürr LUT pack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDKK54CeXgM
https://cinematiccookie.gumroad.com/l/bseftb?layout=profile
The calibration workflows also depend heavily on what is being rendered, source application(s), and the desired content look. There were some common free packs on github for popular programs at one time. Should still be around someplace... good luck. =3
What are you talking about? It's a bitmap. It has nothing to do with "exposure and color problems."
If you've never encountered the use-case, than don't worry about the aesthetics. Seriously, many vendors also just don't care... especially after they already were paid. Best of luck =3
I think your experience is with some tool that made bad PNGs. That is a problem with the tool, not the format.
Have a look at a tutorial that dives into the basic details, and consider learning something:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLt1230dtYE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb0b83MML78
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egtnkhuUe_E
PNG has its use-cases, and some people do expect that baked color-space garbage look given it dominates a lot of low-end media. Have a great day =3
In the first video, the person loads the image and manually chooses a gamma transfer function with 2.2. If that was then saved, it would produce the washed-out fireball you mentioned.
In the second video, the person loads the image and manually chooses rec.709, which is also gamma tf and also produces washed-out fireball. In fact, the EXR image he loads literally has a bright fireball and you see it get washed out.
If you want to make claims about EXR being better than PNG, you need to say why storing the values as floating point is better than integer. But the blown-out fireball example is just incorrect. As evidence, I'll point to HDR. ANYTHING you see in an HDR movie is now 100% losslessly reproducible in a PNG.