There's pretty bad posterization in the background. If you can't see it, kick up your contrast. You don't need HDR levels of contrast to notice it.
WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
51–60 of 411 posts
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#52I dont get it. The author seems to care highly about image quality, but also wants to squeeze out as many bytes as possible? Bandwidth is cheap. If we are talking about photography as art, why would you be trying to scrap a few kb off in the first place?
You missed the point he's making: webp requires 30% more data to achieve the same dynamic than jpeg, so there's no real use for it.
Did he make that point? The only time he thought they were equivalent was when using lossless mode, which is not a reasonable comparison. He never actually compared webp at 30% more quality than jpeg.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#53I don't get the point of complaining about losing such small details that non-educated eye can't see for a compression format. That's the whole point of compressing the image, isn't it? To me, it looks like webp does its job.
OP is a photographer and is pretty clear about that being part of their motivation:
> Stick to JPEG at 90 quality (or at least 85) if images matter to you, e.g. if you are a visual artist. If images are pretty decorations for your textual content, it doesn’t matter.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#54I clearly have "non-educated eyes" as I can't see any meaningful differences personally.
Same here. Especially considering the ones supposedly "look like shit". The whole thing reads like a no-so-subtle brag about how his mighty photographer's eye can spot details that mere mortals can't.
Your viewing environment will matter a lot. In a dark room with a bright monitor, the banding in the background of the example images is pretty bad (if you are looking for it). But if you have a laptop in a bright sunny room in front of a window causing back lighting, you probably won't be able to see it.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#55I clearly have "non-educated eyes" as I can't see any meaningful differences personally.
very interesting, i could clearly see the difference - even before reading. and i'm using a 9-year-old MacBook Air 11'... not bad, but not exactly high-end stuff.
fascinating how perception is different.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#56It's such a shame Google decided to block adoption of JPEG XL: it's a strict improvement over classic JPEG (you can losslessly reencode JPEG to JXL and reduce the size, due to a better entropy coder in JXL!) and JXL has various other upgrades compared to 'classic' JPEG. In the meantime, let's hope AVIF or whatever manages to pick up the slack, and/or other browsers decide en masse to support JPEG XL anyway; that woul…
I must admit, I'm not sure why JPEG XL is viewed so favourably on HN, it's not something I know a ton about, but my understanding is that the big advantage of AVIF is that you can reuse hardware decoders built into devices for AV1 for the images. It being a strict improvement over JPEG is nice for the developers not having to go back to the source image for an upgrade, but that seems like a pretty small benefit that…
Image decode is a rather tiny fraction of the loading time of a modern web page, or its power budget...
Thats why, to my knowledge, nobody even bothers to use hardware jpeg encoders/decoders on phones/laptops, despite many bits of silicon having them.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#57Clearly, from reading the comments here, most people don't see any difference. However, the argument still stands, and perhaps - precisely because of the comments here - it becomes even stronger: there is no point in using WebP.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#58This seems to be in the same spirit as audiophiles claiming they can hear the difference between various speaker cables, or the "hints of dark chocolate" in wine tasting. Personally I see zero differences in the images on that page and unless the author has some really super-human vision abilities (possible! but unlikely) my guess is he doesn't either. WebP looks perfectly fine to me.
> This seems to be in the same spirit as audiophiles claiming they can hear the difference between various speaker cables, or the "hints of dark chocolate" in wine tasting.
I can see why it would seem like that if you aren't seeing it, but it's not the case. The differences in color banding are pretty big if you are on a screen where you can see the background shading clearly.
The brightness of your monitor and the relative brightness of your room will matter a lot. In a bright room, you might not be able to see the subtle banding in the background of the images. But if you are looking at a bright monitor in a dark room, the difference is very obvious.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must admit, I'm not sure why JPEG XL is viewed so favourably on HN, it's not something I know a ton about, but my understanding is that the big advantage of AVIF is that you can reuse hardware decoders built into devices for AV1 for the images. It being a strict improvement over JPEG is nice for the developers not having to go back to the source image for an upgrade, but that seems like a pretty small benefit that…
JPEG XL is viewed favorably on HN because it's the underdog to evil Google. Before they wrote their complaint article about Chrome removing support (after significant time of noone using the format), noone here gave it a thought. It's not like anyone is attacking Firefox for not enabling it either. This is not a format quality thing, this is "let's have a chance to complain about Google" thing again ;) I mean, this w…
I don't know, I liked it on its merits before. I'm sure others did too.
Seamless legacy support is very valuable. And it still performs pretty well compared to competitors. I think it's a good default for a lossy network format.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#60It's such a shame Google decided to block adoption of JPEG XL: it's a strict improvement over classic JPEG (you can losslessly reencode JPEG to JXL and reduce the size, due to a better entropy coder in JXL!) and JXL has various other upgrades compared to 'classic' JPEG. In the meantime, let's hope AVIF or whatever manages to pick up the slack, and/or other browsers decide en masse to support JPEG XL anyway; that woul…
I must admit, I'm not sure why JPEG XL is viewed so favourably on HN, it's not something I know a ton about, but my understanding is that the big advantage of AVIF is that you can reuse hardware decoders built into devices for AV1 for the images. It being a strict improvement over JPEG is nice for the developers not having to go back to the source image for an upgrade, but that seems like a pretty small benefit that…
AVIF kinda needs hardware decoding, because otherwise it’s considerably more expensive than the traditional codecs. Even with hardware decoding, I’m not sure if AVIF is actually faster/chaper—compared in https://jpegxl.io/articles/faq/#%E2%8F%A9speedfeatures, “AVIF” takes 7× as long as libjpeg-turbo to decode, and I don’t believe hardware encoders tend to bring that big a performance difference over software, but I’m really not sure.
AVIF reduces the amount of traffic required, but will tend to consume more power. This is the general compression tradeoff.
(Other formats often have hardware decoding support too, incidentally. But a lot of the time they’re ignored as too much effort to integrate, or buggy, or something.)