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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)

#111

Post by fold3 »

Latty wrote: post #7
ColonelPhantom wrote: post #3

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…

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 light enough to not require hardware support. Did you tried to transcode a PNG to avif? It's painful. Not the case with Jpeg XL. Meanwhile I urge you to read this article. Jpeg XL has way more features than avif.

https://cloudinary.com/blog/the-case-for-jpeg-xl

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

#112

Post by neurostimulant »

bawolff wrote: post #11

I 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 author is also a web designers that primarily use wordpress. Wordpress website owners these days would put their site into pagespeed insight and that tool will advise that images to be converted to webp, then demand their web guy to do it. I imagine the author got tired of seeing images on their sites ruined but can't do anything because that's what the clients want to tick off a box in pagespeed insight.

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

#113

Post by eviks »

Beijinger wrote: post #102
iainmerrick wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really unreasonable for a photographer to have a higher standard of "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.

His claim is too broad. Why not serve RAW files? For the real enthusiasts

Because you wouldn't see the difference in quality while the size difference would be huge

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

#114

Post by [deleted] »

amne wrote: post #98
laserbeam wrote: post #6

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.

I wiped my phone screen a few times until I accepted it is part of the text. Is that a toggle in the text editor? And if it is then should reader clients have a counter toggle for it? I'm thinking autocrlf style.

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by lifthrasiir »

icehawk wrote: post #91

The banding is SUPER monitor dependent, its noticeable on my 4k monitor, super apparent on a different monitor with a terrible LCD panel, and not at all visible on my iPad. I wonder if the author took that into consideration.

> not at all visible on my iPad.

That is indeed surprising. Is it iPad or iPad Pro? It is technically possible that your monitors only support 8bpp color depth while your iPad Pro supports 10bpp (via the P3 color space) and the WebP file has a smooth gradient only when viewed with 10bpp or more. But I can't really believe that, as the original JPEG file still looks like 8bpp and doesn't have any further color profile attached.

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

#116

Post by Semaphor »

vardump wrote: post #20
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 checked those images on a Macbook 16 M2 Max (standard P3-1600 nits preset), Chrome 120.0.6099.109. All of the WebP images had pretty bad posterization, while JPEG examples did not. Edit: You have to actually click for a full size image to see the truth. Those inline images had pretty bad compression artefacts, even the supposed lossless versions. So https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/20... (f…

> I wonder if there's some issue with the WebP encoder (or the settings) he is using?

I played around with online optimizers and IrfanView which I had locally. IrfanView got the results they did, no matter what else I tuned, obvious degradation at 90. Online optimizers were not even comparable in how bad they were.

edit: I found Squoosh [0], which has WebP V2 compression marked as unstable. It’s far better, half the size of JPEG 90, but it’s still degraded in comparison. Also, it saves as wp2 file, which neither Chrome nor FF support natively.

[0]: https://squoosh.app/editor

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

#117

Post by politelemon »

j1elo wrote: post #95

Comparing with Beyond Compare: https://imgur.com/a/xatzZt7 -- Hoping the conversion doesn't add extra noise, I converted them (with ImageMagick: `convert image.webp image.png`) and compared them (Beyond Compare doesn't support WEBP). Of course I have a non-educated eye as the article puts it, but if still with machine help I cannot see a difference in light dithering, there must be something off. The second photo (of…

Wow,had no idea BC did images. I've been using it for years!

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

#120

Post by bradrn »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #72
j1elo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why to draw hairs between all 'ct' and 'st'? As a non-native speaker, is that some English weirdness that I have yet to learn about?

Ligatures are old fashioned in English but still very common in French. Some ligatures are actually mandatory (like the oe in cœur, heart) while others like st are pretty common in proper typefaces such as those used for novels. The author is probably French (Aurélien).

They also space out question marks, exclamation marks and colons, which is standard in French but not in English.
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