My issue with webp is that when it's animated, it seems random whether it gets treated as an image file like a gif or a video file. Any webp I save I have to convert to a real image file to ensure I can view/use it outside of a browser.
WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
311–320 of 411 posts
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#312I 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?
The repeated callouts to PageSpeed imply that their concerned about search placement, which is understandable for the profession. If your site is bumped off the first page because Google doesn't like that you're still using JPEG that's lost income for you.
It can also be an issue if a client asks for WebP. Do you give in and deliver a lower quality image and allow your art to be displayed in a degraded manner? Losing future clients who think your photos look bad. Or refuse out of dignity and lose the current client?
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#313I 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...
If I view the full images of the first two in two Chrome tabs, two Firefox tabs, or download them and open then both in Preview on a 27" 5k iMac and flip back and forth between the two I see nothing changing. There is definitely something changing though, because if I open each in Preview, switch Preview to full screen, set the view to be actual size, and take a full screen screenshot, the screenshot for the WebP ima…
This whole thread feels like one of those "I can tell the difference between an MP3 encoded at 320 kbit/s and one encoded at 256 kbit/s!" audiophile threads. Yes, there are probably people out there with well-calibrated ears who can, but I am sure not one of them. FWIW I have a 27" 5k iMac and can't even remotely see any difference between the images.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#314I 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.…
For clarity if anyone is still confused, on Wikipedia's example image, look at the snakes's shadow - that's what's happening to the background in the blog's image.
I didn't know the word "posterization", so I'd describe this (slightly?) more simply as a stepped gradient instead of a smooth gradient.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#315I'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.
It's like the audiophile equivalent of using $500 speaker wire. Nobody normal really cares about the difference, if there's really any difference at all.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#316I think the author is focusing on the wrong thing. They focused on the difference in format, when they should have focused on the compression. Different image processing programs will have different compression even when set to the same number (eg "80").
I think for a truly meaningful comparison you'd need to test a variety of images including full color with busy backgrounds as well as these b&w studio portraits on a smooth gradient type bg, and test a variety of programs like imagemagik, graphicsMagick, sharp, photoshop, whatever cloud offerings, etc.
The other issue I see is use case. If you're a professional photographer trying to upload full size full quality photos, maybe just don't compress at all so you know your creative / editing work is completely preserved. That use case is not the average use case of a website displaying a reasonably sized image of reasonable quality. For many situations a significantly smaller image might be worth having a more compressed image, and for many images the compression won't be as noticeable as it is in a full resolution professional studio photo with a large gradient type background.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#317So here’s what I don’t get about this post:
> this is WebP re-encoding of an already lossy compressed JPEG
Author is clearly passionate about imagery and quality, so why are they not re-encoding using the original file rather than a lossy copy?
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#318AVIF > webp. (too bad once again Safari lags behind)
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#319Can I just say how happy I am to see the "ct" and "st" ligatures in the article text? I know that took the author extra effort to provide.
I see:
{
font-family: 'Linux Libertine';
font-variant-numeric: oldstyle-nums;
font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures discretionary-ligatures contextual historical-ligatures;
text-rendering: geometricprecision;
font-kerning: normal;
}
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#320I 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 bec…
It could also be a browser issue implementing webp. There's a decade-old bug in Chrome, where they're using the wrong color profile for CSS, so colors are brighter than in other browsers. It's extreme enough that one of the designers I worked with spotted it in passing just glancing at my Firefox window, which led down a rabbit hole finding the bug report.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=44872
Total aside, y'know how people do things like make their smartphones greyscale (or at least mute the colors a bit) to reduce smartphone addiction? It wouldn't surprise me if these over-saturated colors were part of why Chrome got so popular so fast...