Made my own image format.

A new image format offers a potential alternative for developers and designers seeking to optimize image file sizes without the complete loss of quality associated with JPEG.

A new raster image compression format called Portable Middle Link (PML) has been developed, aiming to strike a balance between the lossless quality of PNG and the file size reduction of JPEG. The format's compression pipeline involves several stages: converting to the YCbCr color space, reducing chroma resolution through 4:2:0 subsampling, applying linear quantization with different step sizes for luma and chroma channels, performing sub-filtering to transform pixel data into differences, and finally employing DEFLATE compression via the zlib algorithm with a specific header. The project is publicly available on GitHub, detailing its technical specifications for potential adoption and evaluation.

The creation of PML signals a continued effort within the developer community to find more efficient image compression solutions that address the limitations of existing formats. By combining aspects of both lossless and lossy compression, PML attempts to carve out a niche for scenarios where perfect fidelity is not strictly required but significant file size reduction is desired.

This development could influence how web developers and content creators handle image assets, potentially leading to faster load times and reduced bandwidth usage. The open-source nature of PML on GitHub allows for community scrutiny, contributions, and faster iteration, which may accelerate its adoption if its performance proves compelling against established formats.