4 ms·

This could've been stated more strongly: The only time JPEGs are superior to GIF/PNG is for photos (like taken with a camera).

by aston 18y ago

unalone 18y ago
What makes them superior to GIF/PNG then?
- aston 18y ago
  JPEGs are really good at throwing out the right data for photographs. GIF and PNG are non-lossy formats; you keep every single pixel you put down (although for GIFs you do lose fidelity in the color space if you use more than 256). JPEGs will do a really bad job with pixel perfect, but faces/mountains/flowers/... will look nice even compressed very heavily.
  - unalone 18y ago
    Okay, gotcha! Thanks.
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  I mess around with Photoshop quite a bit and I have noticed that for photos, I almost always can't tell the difference between a maximum quality jpg and a png, while the jpg is much smaller. I can even lower the quality a bit and drastically shrink the jpg size with the quality drop still being barely noticeable if at all. For most other stuff (things created from vectors for instance) pngs often look better and are smaller. To me using a png for a photo (which you see often) is a lot like using a wav file for an audiobook, it's just overkill. I realize how totally unscientific that answer is, but I do often export them as both just to see.
  - aston 18y ago
    Your 'unscientific' analogy between WAV/MP3 and GIF/JPG is actually really spot on, technically speaking. Except unlike GIF, WAV doesn't even attempt to be small.
    - vlad 18y ago
      WAV is more appropriately the audio version of BMP: both try to store all the data they know about. MP3 is the audio version of JPEG: both can be set to keep to a certain standard of quality, preserving what the algorithms detect are the most noticeable and important features of the media to a higher standard than less important features. For GIF, I guess MIDI (musical notes) would be the audio version because GIF's generate very small files when there are few colors in an image, just like MIDI's are typically very small files, and can be used when the entire song is made up of only basic notes and instruments (no sound effects, post-processing, and you don't care if quite important notes sound different and generic, just like gif's can also make the colors different to fit the color space and lose detail.) Both try to describe their media about as succinctly as possible (i.e. smallest file size), and therefore both can be misused when the user expects to retain fine details of the original piece of work when converting to those formats. New formats have been invented or appropriated since these came out, and I could be wrong about everything, but I think this is still useful info.

This could've been stated more strongly: The only time JPEGs are superior to GIF/PNG is for photos (like taken with a camera).

by aston 18y ago

This could've been stated more strongly: The only time JPEGs are superior to GIF/PNG is for photos (like taken with a camera).

unalone 18y ago

What makes them superior to GIF/PNG then?

aston 18y ago
JPEGs are really good at throwing out the right data for photographs. GIF and PNG are non-lossy formats; you keep every single pixel you put down (although for GIFs you do lose fidelity in the color space if you use more than 256). JPEGs will do a really bad job with pixel perfect, but faces/mountains/flowers/... will look nice even compressed very heavily.
- unalone 18y ago
  Okay, gotcha! Thanks.
mattmaroon 18y ago
I mess around with Photoshop quite a bit and I have noticed that for photos, I almost always can't tell the difference between a maximum quality jpg and a png, while the jpg is much smaller. I can even lower the quality a bit and drastically shrink the jpg size with the quality drop still being barely noticeable if at all. For most other stuff (things created from vectors for instance) pngs often look better and are smaller. To me using a png for a photo (which you see often) is a lot like using a wav file for an audiobook, it's just overkill. I realize how totally unscientific that answer is, but I do often export them as both just to see.
- aston 18y ago
  Your 'unscientific' analogy between WAV/MP3 and GIF/JPG is actually really spot on, technically speaking. Except unlike GIF, WAV doesn't even attempt to be small.
  - vlad 18y ago
    WAV is more appropriately the audio version of BMP: both try to store all the data they know about. MP3 is the audio version of JPEG: both can be set to keep to a certain standard of quality, preserving what the algorithms detect are the most noticeable and important features of the media to a higher standard than less important features. For GIF, I guess MIDI (musical notes) would be the audio version because GIF's generate very small files when there are few colors in an image, just like MIDI's are typically very small files, and can be used when the entire song is made up of only basic notes and instruments (no sound effects, post-processing, and you don't care if quite important notes sound different and generic, just like gif's can also make the colors different to fit the color space and lose detail.) Both try to describe their media about as succinctly as possible (i.e. smallest file size), and therefore both can be misused when the user expects to retain fine details of the original piece of work when converting to those formats. New formats have been invented or appropriated since these came out, and I could be wrong about everything, but I think this is still useful info.