That F1 image is, in my mind, proof of exactly what is wrong with AVIF. If you look closely the beautiful highlights on the car have been erased and replaced with something plausible. Once you see it you can't unsee it and it boggles my mind that people are still using it as an example.

Granted, AVIF performs impressively for, say, a huge hero image for a blog where you're out to create an overall impression and people aren't going to look at it closely. It does not impress me when I am compressing photos I took with my mirrorless and I expect them to look like photos taken with a mirrorless and not cell phone snaps.

Would you be able to circle these highlights? I viewed - https://jakearchibald.com/c/original-CXtAofvc.jpg - https://jakearchibald.com/c/avif-q39-e0-d8-yuv444-ssimu70.4-... at 100% magnification at peeped around for a few minutes but didn't notice anything. Maybe my eyes / monitor is bad...

I'm looking as closely as I'm able, and I don't see what you mean. (I'm not a car guy, or a photo guy.) What do you mean by highlights? What am I looking for? Reflections?

OH WAIT. I KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING HERE.

You're looking at it in a browser that doesn't support JPEG XL, so it's falling back to a WASM renderer, and I think it handles resizing differently.

This is totally my bad. I thought I was doing a good thing by adding that fallback renderer, but it isn't identical and it's giving people the wrong impression.

The lossless version is JPEG XL, hence the difference to AVIF.