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

eng.aurelienpierre.com

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

#251

Post by walteweiss »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #245
palata wrote: post #227

I find it interesting how many comments here (presumably from "tech guys") confirm what the author wrote: > So there is a real issue with the design priorities of image algos from tech guys who clearly lack historical and artistic background, and don’t talk to artists, who anyway have largely decided that they were above science, maths and other menial materialistic concerns. I am a tech guy, and when a photographer…

While I agree with the rational component of the article (webp may be inappropriate for artistic photos) I had to force myself to read it. The "t" in the font screws me up completely, I tried twice to wipe the screen of my phone then thought that maybe it's a background picture getting in the way. So overall I find author's aesthetic sense very questionable which contrasts with his high-moral-ground tone.

Haha, I used iPhone’s reader mode, which I do most of the times.

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

#252

Post by Spivak »

palata wrote: post #227

I find it interesting how many comments here (presumably from "tech guys") confirm what the author wrote: > So there is a real issue with the design priorities of image algos from tech guys who clearly lack historical and artistic background, and don’t talk to artists, who anyway have largely decided that they were above science, maths and other menial materialistic concerns. I am a tech guy, and when a photographer…

I think it's more "the target audience for webp is people closer to and arguably less trained than my eyes and I can't see a difference" which is a pretty reasonable take. But tech people aren't typically the best communicators and so I'm not at all surprised it comes off crass.

mp3 is "worse" than flac but if you say it sounds bad I'll absolutely tell you you're wrong and to get off Hi-Fi forums.

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

#253

Post by digging »

cybrox wrote: post #26

It seems I have an uneducated eye by their standards, because I barely see any difference, which I'm happy to admit, but I think the author misses the point of webp completely. The format is intended to bring down the file size of graphics in general, not high-level photography which accounts for probably 0.5% of the images on the internet. This is a case of the best daily driver car won't be good enough for a race c…

Yeah this article comes off as almost idiotic to me. It is entirely irrelevant unless you're supporting high-quality photography on your site, in which case, yeah obviously you're going to be careful about how you compress your images.

For the vast majority of web images, use webp if it's smaller. Minuscule artifacts and judgy designers aren't going to get in the way.

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

#254

Post by sxp »

V__ wrote: 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...

I don't see any difference either on Windows on either of my monitors.

I wonder if the author's issue is due to the author using a Mac. Back when I was at Google working on VR images, my work machine was a Macbook and my home machine was a normal Windows desktop. I realized that images looked worse on my laptop's screen because the native resolution of the display hardware was something like 4000 (numbers made up because I don't remember the specs) but the display was set to 3000. So OSX would incorrectly rescale the image using the wrong gamma curves. Since I was trying to calibrate VR headsets, I spent way too much time looking at gamma test images like https://www.epaperpress.com/monitorcal/gamma.html where a high res pure black + pure white grid is shown next to a set of grays. That was how I realized that my Mac was incorrectly resizing the graphics without being properly gamma aware. I also realized that if I set the OS resolution to 2000, it would use nearest neighbor instead of bilinear filtering and the gamma issue would go away. My Windows desktop had the OS running at the native resolution of the display so this wasn't an issue there. This also wasn't an issue if I had an external monitor hooked up to the Mac and set to its native resolution.

Apple users tend to say "it just works" which is true 90% of the time. But there are cases like this where it doesn't "just work" and there was no easy way to force the OS to run at its native resolution on that specific laptop.

Edit: I tested with the second set of images (the upper body shot) and the problems with the gradient are visible there. But I still can't see a different when quickly flipping through the first part of images on my properly calibrated native-resolution monitor. I _can_ see some banding on one of my monitors that was intentionally miscalibrated so that I could read text better.

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

#255

Post by aidenn0 »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #245
palata wrote: post #227

I find it interesting how many comments here (presumably from "tech guys") confirm what the author wrote: > So there is a real issue with the design priorities of image algos from tech guys who clearly lack historical and artistic background, and don’t talk to artists, who anyway have largely decided that they were above science, maths and other menial materialistic concerns. I am a tech guy, and when a photographer…

While I agree with the rational component of the article (webp may be inappropriate for artistic photos) I had to force myself to read it. The "t" in the font screws me up completely, I tried twice to wipe the screen of my phone then thought that maybe it's a background picture getting in the way. So overall I find author's aesthetic sense very questionable which contrasts with his high-moral-ground tone.

The "t" or the "ct" ligature?

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

#256

Post by BackBlast »

ubercow13 wrote: post #122
627467 wrote: post #66

> 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…

The authors point is that if you are making this tech, you should have educated eyes. And given all the confident comments in this thread claiming the author is full of shit and there's no difference, I think their frustration is justified? If you can't see the difference in the first images that's fine but you probably shouldn't be confidently claiming to know better than the author, let alone designing an image cod…

There's room for different opinions.

His font choice is terrible for my legibility. Maybe for others it's great. But it made the already difficult article that much harder to read. And I like this topic. I already seriously question his sense of what is reasonable and good and for what purpose. His purposes are so alien to mine that his opinion ends up being pretty irrelevant to mine. I wish him well with his.

I can't see the things he's pointing out in the images, and I tried and tried.

I use webp extensively, there have been zero complaints from users about the images. But I don't make art sites. I make software people use to get stuff done. I don't transfer images above maybe 50-80k. Art, aside from modest marketing, is most definitely not the point.

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

#257

Post by gen3 »

account42 wrote: post #154
PetitPrince wrote: post #78

A bit of context: Aurelien Pierre is known to be a major contributor to Darktable (open source raw developper / catalog ; in other words, an open source Adobe Lightroom), and is known to have strong opinion about the correct way do to stuff, to the point of abrasiveness and to the point where he has forked Darktable into its own stuff (Ansel; see HN discussion some times ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38390…

Thanks for the info, going to have to check out Ansel. Do you know if its still compatible with the Darktable formats?

I’m not sure what you mean by formats. It should support all the old raw/jpeg formats, or at minimum it has for me

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

#258

Post by nicbn »

hot_gril wrote: post #238
TacticalCoder wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the technical side, webp support still isn't like png. Oh that's a good point. I see lossless WEBP mostly as a way to save bandwith where PNG would have been used . If you've got a pipeline where, anyway, you already "crush" your PNG file, you may as well also generate a lossless WEBP file and serve that: all browsers support it. And you can fall back on the optimized PNG should the browser not support WEBP. I m…

Only if you can accurately detect browser support and serve the PNG instead, which means added complexity. And you have to store both. Also, if users download your images and use them elsewhere, webp will still be more annoying for them. Though it's not very common that you want them doing that anyway.

https://caniuse.com/webp

Any updated (modern) browser should be able to see webp just fine, I'd rather just serve it without a backup plan if I'm planning to have webp in my website.

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

#259

Post by hardcopy »

Every time I've used webp, I've been disappointed. And when I'm disappointed, I try jxl for giggles and find much better photo quality (especially fine gradients), at a much better file size.

Let's cut our losses, ditch webp and move to jxl.

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

#260

Post by tivert »

V__ wrote: 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...

> 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.

One easy difference to spot is the background in this pair is posterized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterization) in webp but not in jpg:

https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/20...

https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/20...

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