Side-by-side let me improve my understanding of the algorithms' trade-offs (think for example comparing different compression algorithms, inspecting artifacts). It would also help me debug my codes by comparing pixels values with a reference for example, and many other usages.
Of course, those are not the only requirements, but it would already spare me a lot of time to be able to open this kind of format by simply clicking on the file :)
The others operations I perform daily are frames' differences (|img1 - img2|) and display them using some colormap. We also frequently need to run several quality metrics like MS-PSNR, SSIM, etc.. to "objectively" evaluate what we see.
For the OpenEXR their lib is ok for opening images, I need this because several images I use have only one channel in 16bits, and it's one of the only formats capable of storing this kind of data.
While for YUV, the format is actually extremely simple! It's just a big array containing an intensity component (luma) and colors components (chroma) with some upscaling[1] and GPU's decoders can work with them if it's a performance issue [2] ;).
Both are standard in the professional video community! Think of them as "raw" video formats.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60729170/python-opencv-c...
[2] https://docs.nvidia.com/drive/drive_os_5.1.6.1L/nvvib_docs/i...