libjxl | JPEG XL image format reference implementation | Compression library

The libjxl encoder either takes a JPEG bitstream as input (for the special case of lossless JPEG recompression), or pixels. It does not make any difference if those pixels are given via a PPM file, a PNG8 file, a PNG24 file, an RGB memory buffer, or any other way, if the pixels are the same, the result will be the same.

In your example, you have an image that is just solid white, so it will be encoded the same way regardless of how you pass it to cjxl.

Now if those pixels happen to use only few colors, as will be the case for PNG8 since there can be at most 256 colors in that case, the encoder (at a default effort setting) will detect this and use the jxl Palette transform to represent the image more compactly. In jxl, palettes can have arbitrary sizes, there is no limit to 256 colors. The --palette option in cjxl can be used to set the maximum number of colors for which it will still use the Palette transform — if the input image has more colors than that, it will not use Palette.

The use of Palette is considered an internal encoding tool in jxl, not part of the externally exposed image metadata. It can be used by the encoder to effectively recompress PNG8 files, but by no means will it necessarily always use that encoding tool when the input is PNG8, and it might also use Palette when the input has more than 256 colors. The Palette transform of jxl is quite versatile, it can also be applied to individual channels, to more or less than 3 channels, and palette entries can be not only specific colors but also so-called "delta palette entries" which are not a color but signed pixel values that get added to the predicted pixel value.