81–90 of 411 posts
You can use picture/source/srcset to provide different image formats depending on browser support. avif for modern browsers, jpg for maximum compatibility. Means people with old browsers will either get lower quality or a few more bytes, but that seems like an okay tradeoff.
> To the non-educated eye, this might look ok, but for a photographer it’s not, and for several reasons. There surely must be better examples to show "non-educated" plebs (to use the tone of the post) why webp is bad and to justify the post and the tone. I'm on Android, maybe this is why all pic quality look the same? Also - yeah, if you are making pics for educated eyes: don't use tech that is not suitable for educa…
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. 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 r…
You are right. I just made my room dark to try this out, and now I can see the banding!
I opened the first two pictures in separate tabs and switched quickly between them. There is zero difference. Tried it on two different monitors, Chrome and Firefox. Same with the pictures of the guy at the end. EDIT: The last comparison is webp twice, he linked it wrong. Here is the jpg one, still no difference: https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/20...
4k Dell monitor, Safari on a Mac.
The author may be right but he definitely does not understand the difference between good and good enough.
Anyway, his point is that JPEG was already "good enough", and WebP is not actually "good" for his purposes despite claims that it's better than JPEG for all purposes.
Earlier 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…
> after significant time of noone using the format
That's also fasle, this is too new of a format for any significant time of no use to materialize, besides, requiring flags that vast majority of users will not enable is a huge factor limiting widespread use
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did the same, and it took me a long time to spot it, but in the upper-right corner you see circles in the WebP version. It's outside the centre of attention, so it's not that obvious. Actually, it wasn't until I saw the second picture and knew what to look for that I spotted this in the first picture. It's not so easy to see if the browser zooms the image, so make sure to open the image and set zoom to 100%. I also…
I always zoom in on pictures on the web to see if the compression is good or if there are artifacts.
That said, in the context of showing off your photography I can understand considering these kind of artifacts undesirable, even though they're perfectly fine for a lot of other uses. On my own website I spent quite some time downgrading my mugshot to be as small as possible without too many artifacts – it's now 4.9K in WebP, vs. 9.2K in JPEG before. Maybe that was a tad obsessive though...
I do think the author doesn't quite appreciate that most people are not photographers, and that for most images quality doesn't actually matter all that much.
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. 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.
> I have seen a similar effect in other similar pictures : always pictures with large, smooth, gradients in the background, which happens a lot when some punctual-ish light falls off a wall. That’s not something accidental, smooth fall-off are actively built by photographers to create organic-looking backgrounds with just enough of texture to not get boring, yet discrete enough to not draw attention off the foreground/subject.
I think this rant could have highlighted these paragraphs a lot more, because these are indeed problems. The first paragraph probably refers to [1] where it doesn't say too much about recompression artifacts, and the second paragraph is indeed a well-known issue of the lossy WebP format---it tends to create gradient bands that are particularly significant when viewed on big and bright screens. It is far-fetched to claim that this requires somehow trained eyes, rather it is more or less device-specific in my opinion.
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/use...
Yes, there is some banding, because it's a web format designed for small file size. 10-bit AVIF has smooth gradients in smaller size, thought not as well supported yet.