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WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

eng.aurelienpierre.com

181–190 of 411 posts

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#181
post #4

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...

He also screwed up the 4th and 5th image - one of the ones labeled "85% jpeg lossy" links to the webp.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#182
post #2

I clearly have "non-educated eyes" as I can't see any meaningful differences personally.

Like most folks you were probably simply looking at the foreground. The background around the edges of the shirt and the edges of the picture (depending on the image) noticeably change color from shot to shot without full screening it on my small Android 12 device.

It's artifacts made in the background of the image that this poster is complaining about.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#183
post #132

I've noticed the same issue with WebP and have gone back to JPG/PNG for most things (jpg for photos, png for UI-type images) I think the real problem is, like many of the commenters here, most people can't tell the difference because desktop monitors have been stuck in a deadzone of zero innovation for the last 10 years. I'm sure half the folks here are viewing his example images on a 2012-era HD 1920x1080 LCD, which…

I'm on a 27" 4K IPS screen here and have to squint/zoom in to see the difference the author is writing about. While it's nice some people really care for the best result I think most people aren't going to notice or care about it.

I caught it on my Android 12 without full screening. He's talking about the background, not the foreground. The backgrounds color noticeably changes from shot to shot around edges.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#184
post #145

I've noticed the same issue with WebP and have gone back to JPG/PNG for most things (jpg for photos, png for UI-type images) I think the real problem is, like many of the commenters here, most people can't tell the difference because desktop monitors have been stuck in a deadzone of zero innovation for the last 10 years. I'm sure half the folks here are viewing his example images on a 2012-era HD 1920x1080 LCD, which…

I have an extremely hard time perceiving any difference on a 27" 4K monitor. I am not even sure I really see them. The examples are just bad. If you want to show something, screenshot and enlarge it to show the artifacts.

He was talking about the background, not the foreground.

The difference is in color around the edges of the picture in the background change noticeably on a non-fullscreen image on my Android 12 device.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#186

I know this is not constructive and I'm sorry, but I just can't read the text with those st and ct ligatures. It makes me feel like the author is trolling with them and I shouldn't take the text seriously. I know that's an exaggeration but that's what the design makes me feel.

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Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#187

It'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…

[deleted]

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#188
If I cared about archive image quality (and I do), I wouldn't re-compress older images in a new format unless I could do so from uncompressed originals. Re-encoding from a lossy compressed source will make quality worse. Storage is cheap and getting cheaper.

What would make sense is choosing safe settings for compressing new photos in the new format.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#190

> It’s not 100 % clean either, but much better. Granted, this is WebP re-encoding of an already lossy compressed JPEG, so we stack 2 steps of destructive compression. But this is what Google Page Speed insights encourage you to do and what a shitload of plugins enable you to do, while pretending it’s completely safe. It’s not. > I have seen a similar effect in other similar pictures : always pictures with large, smoo…

Independently of that article, I've experimented with webp to find out when I would use it, and concluded approximately the following (of course, somebody else can have different preferences and conclusions):

- If you know how stills from mp4 videos or similar "look like" (when observed so that the compression artifacts are visible) -- that's more-or-less lossy webp. Not something you'd expect to achieve the best picture quality.

- Probably because of its origins, that's also how lossy webp handles scanned or printed images: not good.

I've concluded that I will use webp, but

1) to save the pictures for which I don't care which quality they have, and if I want to use up less bytes: specifically: if I want to save some visual information from some JPEG from somewhere only to store a picture of that not to preserve it in its full quality.

2) when serving the pictures, in scenarios where I want to reduce the amount of data delivered to others, when the artifacts I'm aware of aren't the issue.

Everything else: still no.

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