4 ms·

I don't think most pictures on the Internet come from a camera verbatim. If you look at something like cnn.com or arstechnica.com - most images on that page ha

by andrewf 16y ago

I don't think most pictures on the Internet come from a camera verbatim. If you look at something like cnn.com or arstechnica.com - most images on that page have been scaled, cropped, composited with other images and finally re-encoded.

sprout 16y ago
Where are most pictures on the Internet? I would guess Facebook and Flickr, uploaded by users who haven't the skill or the time to bother touching up the pictures they took today.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- robin_reala 16y ago
  The only time you see an original photo on Flickr is by going to choose size and selecting original. Everything else has been re-encoded.
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  Flickr, Picasa and such re-encodes the images to various sizes for display even if the untouched original is available. I believe that many phones offer to downsize before upload to save bandwidth in the other direction too.
- FooBarWidget 16y ago
  Why would anybody care about the format that Facebook users use? I see way more value in reencoding company website images in WebP so that things load faster at the same quality. This is especially useful if your visitors are fairly technical, i.e. when you are a systems software vendor or when you're a tech blogger: even if WebP is only supported by Chrome and Firefox, it means half of your audience can enjoy the faster loading times. With HTTP content negotiation you can gracefully fallback to JPG. WebP does not need the support of Facebook users to become valuable.
  - sprout 16y ago
    Facebook users, myself included, care a good deal. Facebook's introduction of 2000px wide images (close to the output of most consumer cameras) makes this all the more important. If Facebook's letting people upload directly from their cameras to the site with no scaling, the format the camera uses is a big deal. Also, Facebook is a very large portion of photos shared over the web.
CWuestefeld 16y ago
For professional stuff, definitely. But there's a movement afoot to build greater image-processing power into cameras, doing all of those operations right there on the device. Personally, I'd never do that. I shoot RAW, and then handle on my desktop -- and calibrated monitor -- all of the adjustments. If nothing else, no matter how good the camera's CPU, the awful display on the back of the camera makes serious work impossible. It just can't be big enough if it's on the back of a convenient camera, and it won't be calibrated. But for your average person taking photos of the kids at their soccer game, they don't care about any of that. The camera makers do a pretty good job of fine-tuning the heuristics (white balance, color adjustment, sharpening, etc.) so that the JPEG the camera produces is usually quite good, even if it's not excellent. These people will be the ones driving a new "broadcast" image format. For quality stuff, the enthusiasts and pros have DNG and TIFF.

by andrewf 16y ago

sprout 16y ago

Where are most pictures on the Internet? I would guess Facebook and Flickr, uploaded by users who haven't the skill or the time to bother touching up the pictures they took today.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
robin_reala 16y ago
The only time you see an original photo on Flickr is by going to choose size and selecting original. Everything else has been re-encoded.
ZeroGravitas 16y ago
Flickr, Picasa and such re-encodes the images to various sizes for display even if the untouched original is available. I believe that many phones offer to downsize before upload to save bandwidth in the other direction too.
FooBarWidget 16y ago
Why would anybody care about the format that Facebook users use? I see way more value in reencoding company website images in WebP so that things load faster at the same quality. This is especially useful if your visitors are fairly technical, i.e. when you are a systems software vendor or when you're a tech blogger: even if WebP is only supported by Chrome and Firefox, it means half of your audience can enjoy the faster loading times. With HTTP content negotiation you can gracefully fallback to JPG. WebP does not need the support of Facebook users to become valuable.
- sprout 16y ago
  Facebook users, myself included, care a good deal. Facebook's introduction of 2000px wide images (close to the output of most consumer cameras) makes this all the more important. If Facebook's letting people upload directly from their cameras to the site with no scaling, the format the camera uses is a big deal. Also, Facebook is a very large portion of photos shared over the web.

CWuestefeld 16y ago

For professional stuff, definitely. But there's a movement afoot to build greater image-processing power into cameras, doing all of those operations right there on the device. Personally, I'd never do that. I shoot RAW, and then handle on my desktop -- and calibrated monitor -- all of the adjustments. If nothing else, no matter how good the camera's CPU, the awful display on the back of the camera makes serious work impossible. It just can't be big enough if it's on the back of a convenient camera, and it won't be calibrated. But for your average person taking photos of the kids at their soccer game, they don't care about any of that. The camera makers do a pretty good job of fine-tuning the heuristics (white balance, color adjustment, sharpening, etc.) so that the JPEG the camera produces is usually quite good, even if it's not excellent. These people will be the ones driving a new "broadcast" image format. For quality stuff, the enthusiasts and pros have DNG and TIFF.