Adobe and Intel seem to share your thinking with HDR driving this generation of image formats. https://helpx.adobe.com/si/camera-raw/using/hdr-output.html http

Adobe and Intel seem to share your thinking with HDR driving this generation of image formats. https://helpx.adobe.com/si/camera-raw/using/hdr-output.html https://helpx.adobe.com/si/camera-raw/using/hdr-output.html JPEG XL has HDR always built-in into its modeling, both SDR and HDR images are modeled exactly the same way and give the exactly same visual quality with the same encoding parameters. Compositing SDR and HDR materials does not need conversions between colorspaces -- everything is in absolute color XYB colorspace. Other codecs (AVIF, HEVC) need a different set of encoding parameters for obtaining the same visual quality when used for SDR or HDR. Compositing SDR and HDR materials necessarily needs color conversions, since they will have different normalizations. Knowing which HDR quality setting corresponds which SDR setting will become additional cognitive load for the users.