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from the just-use-a-photocopier-multiple-times dept.
Google has developed and open-sourced a new JPEG algorithm that reduces file size by about 35 percent—or alternatively, image quality can be significantly improved while keeping file size constant. Importantly, and unlike some of its other efforts in image compression (WebP, WebM), Google's new JPEGs are completely compatible with existing browsers, devices, photo editing apps, and the JPEG standard.
The new JPEG encoder is called Guetzli, which is Swiss German for cookie (the project was led by Google Research's Zurich office). Don't pay too much attention to the name: after extensive analysis, I can't find anything in the Github repository related to cookies or indeed any other baked good.
There are numerous ways of tweaking JPEG image quality and file size, but Guetzli focuses on the quantization stage of compression. Put simply, quantization is a process that tries to reduce a large amount of disordered data, which is hard to compress, into ordered data, which is very easy to compress. In JPEG encoding, this process usually reduces gentle colour gradients to single blocks of colour and often obliterates small details entirely.
The difficult bit is finding a balance between removing detail, and keeping file size down. Every lossy encoder (libjpeg, x264, lame) does it differently.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday March 20 2017, @07:11AM
For the love of FSM, why is JPEG compression still a thing in this millennium?
PNG is more than two decades old now, provides flawless (lossless) compression, and is not patent-encumbered. I'm not aware of any technical reason why JPEG is better, leaving momentum and ignorance as possible explanations.
Because sometimes you don't need lossless compression, so the trade-off of increased file size isn't worth it. Bandwidth and storage concerns are "still a thing in this millennium" as you put it. PNG is awesome at what it does, and I often store images as PNG locally so I have a lossless version, but when I want to transfer one of those images to someone else I convert to JPEG unless the other person will need lossless as well.
News flash, this is also why we resize images before distribution as well. When I take a photo I might keep a lossless 10+ megapixel image (usually RAW) for myself, but when I'm showing it to someone else I resize it and convert to JPEG because they don't need the giant lossless file, so why waste time and bandwidth?
Give me a camera that converts the picture straight to PNG instead of shitting all over my photos. Thank you.
Get a camera that can save RAW instead of whatever piece of shit you've got that can't, it's a better way to store the original data.