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PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation
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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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But is it backwards compatible with an old version that can't be updated?
Probably means there will be new PNGs that old software won't be able to open.
It makes sense, right? Is there a way around that when adding new features to a file format?
The alternative is to make another file format for clarity, but it's not really what you want to do.
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.
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!