Re: [CinePaint] jpg worse

Frank Peters <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.video.cinepaint.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:35:59 -0500 (CDT)
Bob Friesenhahn <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> For natural scenes, it is difficult to find visible evidence of JPEG artifacts 
> for reasonable JPEG compression levels.  If the image is processed several 
> times and saved as JPEG each time, the artifacts will become more apparent. 
> That is why saving to JPEG should be the last step.
> 

JPEG, although useful, is still antiquated technology.  JPEG2000
was supposed to be the new compression standard but for some reason
it hasn't been widely adopted.

I have compressed 48 megabyte 16-bit color files down to 2 megabytes
(and still 16-bit) using JPEG2000 with no discernable loss of quality.


> The biggest problems noticed with JPEG compression are for non-natural computer 
> renderings with sharp features such as text.
> 

That's not really a problem.  It is only a case that goes beyond
the JPEG design standard.

JPEG uses the discrete cosine transform on 8x8 pixel blocks of data.  
The assumption is that there are no sharp transitions within that
8x8 block.  In the case of line drawings or text, the sharp boundaries
often end up within the 8x8 block and this represents extremely
high spatial frequency.  During compression, the highest frequnecies
are discardes leaving a very ugly mess as a result.

So using JPEG on line drawings or figures, or text, implies that
the user has made a poor choice of compression algorithms.

Frank Peters


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