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As a professional photographer I can’t believe we’ve been stuck with jpeg so long - 8 bits simply aren’t enough and lossy saving is a bummer. I’ll need both Ca

As a professional photographer I can’t believe we’ve been stuck with jpeg so long - 8 bits simply aren’t enough and lossy saving is a bummer. I’ll need both Capture One and Lightroom to support whatever gets decided on though, and that could take a while.

emkoemko 5y ago
try out darktable, its way more capable of a raw editor then those two and usually gets support for new export formats fairly fast.
- yakubin 5y ago
  It has poor support for input formats though. E.g. it still doesn't support CR3. I prefer RawTherapee which supports CR3, doesn't look like a space station and still is miles ahead of Lightroom in terms of capability.
- Auracle 5y ago
  I actually meant to say Capture One and Photoshop. I know this is HN and we're gung-ho about open source but the last time I tried Darktable it didn't hold a candle to Capture One. To be fair that was a few years ago, but the color work put in to Capture One doesn't really have an equal IMO.
  - emkoemko 5y ago
    not sure when you used it but you should try it again now... i have been on Lightroom and Capture One for years, tried DT last year and never bothered coming back to them, nothing to do with it being open source its just straight up a better raw editor, yes its hard to learn but once you figure it out you will see how much better it handles editing raw images, especially with the filmic module
webmobdev 5y ago
JPEG2000 is a good option for lossless compression. JPEG XL seems to offer better result and improvements now, but it isn't yet mainstream and has competition.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Auracle 5y ago
  Have you ever tried to open/save JPEG2000s in Photoshop? It's ridiculously slow compared to pretty much anything else. Plus, it doesn't really matter when I can't deliver files to clients in that format.
  - webmobdev 5y ago
    I use the J2K photoshop plug-in - https://www.fnordware.com/j2k/ https://www.fnordware.com/j2k/ . And even macOS Preview supports JPEG2000 (HEIF on macOS on the other hand is not suitable for professional graphic works; doesn't work with CMYK).
ibigb 5y ago
A jpeg pixel is 64 (=8 x 8), 8 bit coefficients which are summed together for each pixel. That result is not 8 bits, but more; that is a misunderstanding, often repeated. A jpeg is capable of over 11 bits dynamic range. You can figure out that an 11 bit dynamic range image has more than 8 bits. See the wikipedia.
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  Thanks for that info! To save others from Googling, the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG
- SideQuark 5y ago
  A jpeg pixel is not 64 eight-bit coefficients. Jpeg compresses an 8x8 pixel block at a time by taking a DCT (which mathematically is lossless, but in practice is not due to rounding and quantization at this stage), which turns those original 8x8 values into another set of 8x8 values, then some of these are thrown away and/or quantized for lossy compression. Decompression is the reverse: take these 8x8 quantized DCT coefficients, perform an inverse 8x8 DCT top get pixel values. The 11-bit dynamic range part you claim is merely from a color profile, which takes the resulting 8 bits per channel (i.e., 256 possible values) and spreads them over a gamma curve to an 11-bit range. But there are still only 256 possible levels per channel, too few for quality image editing. Think of it as squaring: taking [0,255] as your input and squaring every value gives you a range of 0 to 255^2 = 65025, but that does not allow you to store any value in that range. It only allows you the 256 values that are squares. So the dynamic range is 11 stops, but the number of representable levels per channel is still 8 bit: 256 levels. This makes gradients band no matter how you do them in JPEG. It's why photo processing software wants RAW, not JPEG. JPEG, besides being lossy, does not allow enough steps. One example: given a so-so RAW, at 11 bits, you can pull out dark things or darken bright things smoothly. This is not possible once you go to jpeg, for any implementation of jpeg.
  - ibigb 5y ago
    I said a jpeg pixel is the summation of 64 8 bit coefficients. The coefficients are 8 bit, but obviously the cosine values are not 8 bit. They can be floating point. All a jpeg need give is coefficients, the coder/decoder knows what to do with them. Summing 64 products, with each product = 8 bit numbers x cosine value gives more than an 8 bit result for the resultant pixel. In addition, there is another dct for the color values. This adds more bits of info. The cosine values are transcendental numbers, they can have an infinite number of decimal places, yes? So adding up 64 products of (cosine values * 8 bit integer) to get 1 pixel value can obviously have more than 8 bits.
bumblebritches5 5y ago

emkoemko 5y ago

try out darktable, its way more capable of a raw editor then those two and usually gets support for new export formats fairly fast.

yakubin 5y ago
It has poor support for input formats though. E.g. it still doesn't support CR3. I prefer RawTherapee which supports CR3, doesn't look like a space station and still is miles ahead of Lightroom in terms of capability.
Auracle 5y ago
I actually meant to say Capture One and Photoshop. I know this is HN and we're gung-ho about open source but the last time I tried Darktable it didn't hold a candle to Capture One. To be fair that was a few years ago, but the color work put in to Capture One doesn't really have an equal IMO.
- emkoemko 5y ago
  not sure when you used it but you should try it again now... i have been on Lightroom and Capture One for years, tried DT last year and never bothered coming back to them, nothing to do with it being open source its just straight up a better raw editor, yes its hard to learn but once you figure it out you will see how much better it handles editing raw images, especially with the filmic module

webmobdev 5y ago

JPEG2000 is a good option for lossless compression. JPEG XL seems to offer better result and improvements now, but it isn't yet mainstream and has competition.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Auracle 5y ago
Have you ever tried to open/save JPEG2000s in Photoshop? It's ridiculously slow compared to pretty much anything else. Plus, it doesn't really matter when I can't deliver files to clients in that format.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  I use the J2K photoshop plug-in - https://www.fnordware.com/j2k/ https://www.fnordware.com/j2k/ . And even macOS Preview supports JPEG2000 (HEIF on macOS on the other hand is not suitable for professional graphic works; doesn't work with CMYK).

ibigb 5y ago

A jpeg pixel is 64 (=8 x 8), 8 bit coefficients which are summed together for each pixel. That result is not 8 bits, but more; that is a misunderstanding, often repeated. A jpeg is capable of over 11 bits dynamic range. You can figure out that an 11 bit dynamic range image has more than 8 bits. See the wikipedia.

stingraycharles 5y ago
Thanks for that info! To save others from Googling, the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG
SideQuark 5y ago
A jpeg pixel is not 64 eight-bit coefficients. Jpeg compresses an 8x8 pixel block at a time by taking a DCT (which mathematically is lossless, but in practice is not due to rounding and quantization at this stage), which turns those original 8x8 values into another set of 8x8 values, then some of these are thrown away and/or quantized for lossy compression. Decompression is the reverse: take these 8x8 quantized DCT coefficients, perform an inverse 8x8 DCT top get pixel values. The 11-bit dynamic range part you claim is merely from a color profile, which takes the resulting 8 bits per channel (i.e., 256 possible values) and spreads them over a gamma curve to an 11-bit range. But there are still only 256 possible levels per channel, too few for quality image editing. Think of it as squaring: taking [0,255] as your input and squaring every value gives you a range of 0 to 255^2 = 65025, but that does not allow you to store any value in that range. It only allows you the 256 values that are squares. So the dynamic range is 11 stops, but the number of representable levels per channel is still 8 bit: 256 levels. This makes gradients band no matter how you do them in JPEG. It's why photo processing software wants RAW, not JPEG. JPEG, besides being lossy, does not allow enough steps. One example: given a so-so RAW, at 11 bits, you can pull out dark things or darken bright things smoothly. This is not possible once you go to jpeg, for any implementation of jpeg.
- ibigb 5y ago
  I said a jpeg pixel is the summation of 64 8 bit coefficients. The coefficients are 8 bit, but obviously the cosine values are not 8 bit. They can be floating point. All a jpeg need give is coefficients, the coder/decoder knows what to do with them. Summing 64 products, with each product = 8 bit numbers x cosine value gives more than an 8 bit result for the resultant pixel. In addition, there is another dct for the color values. This adds more bits of info. The cosine values are transcendental numbers, they can have an infinite number of decimal places, yes? So adding up 64 products of (cosine values * 8 bit integer) to get 1 pixel value can obviously have more than 8 bits.

bumblebritches5 5y ago