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Maybe it's time to retire the old JPEG format which is now, what, over 30 years old? 
There are far better image formats out there that beat JPEG in every single metric.
The best state-of-the-art successor to JPEG is JPEG XL and it's been recognized and provided support by more and more software and image viewers recently. Would it be possible to add support for the JPEG XL format in VrayBitmap? This should help tremendously with file sizes and image quality.
Here are a few key highlights:
Below are some more resources that explain what JPEG XL is and how it works more in-depth:
There are far better image formats out there that beat JPEG in every single metric.The best state-of-the-art successor to JPEG is JPEG XL and it's been recognized and provided support by more and more software and image viewers recently. Would it be possible to add support for the JPEG XL format in VrayBitmap? This should help tremendously with file sizes and image quality.
Here are a few key highlights:
- Significantly better image quality and compression ratios compared to JPEG - about 60% smaller than JPEG for the same visual quality.
- Supports lossless compression with file sizes up to 50% smaller than losslessly compressed TIF and PNG images.
- Lossless JPEG transcoding - you can resave your old JPEGs as JPEG XL without any quality loss and still get ~20% smaller file sizes.
- Supports high bit depth (including 32-bit). Full support for wide gamut and HDR.
- Supports transparency (both lossless and lossy), layers and multi-frame.
- Resilient to generational loss - Unlike JPEG, you can resave your images with lossy compression even 1000 times and the degradation to image quality at the end will be minimal. JPEG on the other hand quickly falls apart after resaving the same image over and over a few dozen times (unless saved with very high quality each time which increases file size).
- Faster encode and decode on multi-core CPUs.
- Even at lower image quality, the visual artifacts are much more visually appealing and less "blocky" than JPEG. Even at high levels of compression there's pretty much no nasty banding artifacts in uniform areas such as skies or gradients.
Below are some more resources that explain what JPEG XL is and how it works more in-depth:
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