JPEG XL (.jxl) support

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max Requests
1

Maybe it’s time to retire the old JPEG format which is now, what, over 30 years old? :slight_smile: 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:

  1. JPEG XL overview (slide presentation)
  2. Official JPEG XL website
  3. JPEG XL and libjxl community website​
2

Very interesting; I’d not known about this.
According to a list found here, hardly anything can edit them https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/recommended-workflow-for-viewing-jpeg-xl/m-p/13644691

Seems like a no-brainer to convert but possibly likely to be a long time until greater adoption.

3

In 2026, it seems like it’s better than AVIF, WebP and most of openEXR compression methods.
Could vray support import and export of this format?

4

We will look into this. My advice is to register this request in our ideas portal to track interest. https://chaosvray.ideas.aha.io/?category=7381383096037645460

Edit: A bit more information from our dev team: DWAA, DWAB compressions are based on the same algorithm, so when it comes to compression vs. quality, this is accessible even now from our OptionRE

Nevertheless, please log a request in our portal. This will give us a better view of how popular this demand is. Thank you.

5

I 100% second that. After a long and indepth research, I came to the conclusion, plus, the file size is like 10% or even smaller than EXR. (In some of my tests, a 24mb exr can be converted to a 600kb JXL.) It beats AVIF and WebP into the water.

The only issue is, after effects and other adobe software can only import this format via “camera raw”, so it’s not easy to treat it as an image sequence without any third party solutions.

6

Thank you. I still have issues with DWA compression. Could you or someone give me a step by step guidance? I tried everything in OptionRE. Thanks a million!

7

What kind of issues?