5 ms·

> To the non-educated eye, this might look ok, but for a photographer it’s not, and for several reasons. There surely must be better examples to show "non-educ

by 627467 3y ago

> To the non-educated eye, this might look ok, but for a photographer it’s not, and for several reasons. There surely must be better examples to show "non-educated" plebs (to use the tone of the post) why webp is bad and to justify the post and the tone. I'm on Android, maybe this is why all pic quality look the same? Also - yeah, if you are making pics for educated eyes: don't use tech that is not suitable for educated eyes? Or don't outsource that decision making to others?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
See the discussion here [1], you need to view it full size to be able to tell. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38653224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38653224
- chmike 3y ago
  A close up section of the same zone in the images would make them visible. I could hardly see the artefacts in the first place as my attention was caught with the highly contrasted parts of the images.
- afavour 3y ago
  …so essentially WebP is fine for mobile devices and the vast majority of desktop web cases. I’m fine with WebP not being a suitable format for permanent storage of photography.
- Izkata 3y ago
  No, I can see it on Android without zooming in. Not well for sure, but it is there towards the corners.
ubercow13 3y ago
The authors point is that if you are making this tech, you should have educated eyes. And given all the confident comments in this thread claiming the author is full of shit and there's no difference, I think their frustration is justified? If you can't see the difference in the first images that's fine but you probably shouldn't be confidently claiming to know better than the author, let alone designing an image codec.
- Pxtl 3y ago
  Still, the author could do more to highlight the differences using zooms and annotations. The banding in the background is particularly strong and would help their point to highlight visually to the reader.
- BackBlast 3y ago
  There's room for different opinions. His font choice is terrible for my legibility. Maybe for others it's great. But it made the already difficult article that much harder to read. And I like this topic. I already seriously question his sense of what is reasonable and good and for what purpose. His purposes are so alien to mine that his opinion ends up being pretty irrelevant to mine. I wish him well with his. I can't see the things he's pointing out in the images, and I tried and tried. I use webp extensively, there have been zero complaints from users about the images. But I don't make art sites. I make software people use to get stuff done. I don't transfer images above maybe 50-80k. Art, aside from modest marketing, is most definitely not the point.
  - ubercow13 3y ago
    If you tried and couldn't see, it might be like others say that it's more visible on certain monitors and setups. But then, again - if you are designing codecs or choosing them, you probably want a monitor that makes it easy to see these things. I can see them on my old iPhone screen. It reminds me of how sometimes you see a huge billboard hideously strong 10 foot wide JPEG compression artifacts. It was someone's job to make those, too.
    - BackBlast 3y ago
      > But then, again - if you are designing codecs or choosing them, you probably want a monitor that makes it easy to see these things You keep bringing this up. I don't really care. Someone designing a codec may have put this apparent problem case on the don't-care list as well. I would be in general agreement with the designer's priorities for a reasonable web codec. I have, with some care, selected webp as a general codec for web use on most of my sites. Nobody is complaining, and my page weights and development speed is improved. I don't have to fret between png+transparency and jpg to minimize asset size while maintaining it's usability. I just use webp and most of the time it's a size/speed win with good enough quality. Not every codec needs to be artist and photographer approved.
izacus 3y ago
For starters, anyone that ever worked with a codec, will know that you don't compare them with ONE SINNGLE IMAGE. This whole basic idea of the blog post is just to generate more whining and clicks and not to actually make a comparison between formats that's worth a basic smell test.
- acdha 3y ago
  This cuts against WebP more: all of Google’s marketing was “it’s a third smaller!!!!” and then when you looked they were comparing it to unoptimized libjpeg outout and using computational metrics like SSIM which only crudely approximate what humans notice about image quality. I did the same comparison the author did when WebP came out but used an optimized JPEG encoder and found the same conclusion: when you produced subjectively equivalent images, the savings were more like -10% to +15% and for web sites which didn’t get Google-scale traffic the performance impact was negative since it made caching less effective and you had to support an entire new toolchain.
  - izacus 3y ago
    In what way does "anything cut" against anything when you do cherry picked single datum point comparison? There isn't a codec pair in this world where you can't make a cherry picked comparison where one of them is worse (I've done plenty of those).
    - acdha 3y ago
      Criticism of cherry-picking cuts against WebP because the marketing campaign for that codec relied on cherry-picking both the least optimized JPEG codec and the most favorable metrics for comparison. If you had humans comparing images or enabled JPEG optimization you saw far less exciting numbers for WebP - usually under 10% savings, not uncommonly negative – and there were other formats which consistently outperformed it. You can see the mood around that time here: https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2014/mozjpeg-3-0/ https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2014/mozjpeg-3-0/ Even a decade later, however, Google repeats the 25-34% claim and their performance tools tell developers they should use a modern format, which by sheer coincidence means the one they invented rather than the best ones on the market.
djha-skin 3y ago
I too am on Android. I was able to see it without full screening. Look at the man with his face screwed up. Look at the edges of his shirt near his shoulders. In the pictures that had bad image quality, there is a sort of glow around his shoulders, as if they are backlit. In the pictures that had a good image quality, The gradient was smooth. There was no backlit glow around his shoulders; it just looked like a smooth gradient background image. To be clear, I'm not a photographer. I'm a DevOps engineer. The last time I professionally wrote a line of JavaScript was at least 11 years ago. It's easy enough to see.

by 627467 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

supriyo-biswas 3y ago

See the discussion here [1], you need to view it full size to be able to tell. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38653224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38653224

chmike 3y ago
A close up section of the same zone in the images would make them visible. I could hardly see the artefacts in the first place as my attention was caught with the highly contrasted parts of the images.
afavour 3y ago
…so essentially WebP is fine for mobile devices and the vast majority of desktop web cases. I’m fine with WebP not being a suitable format for permanent storage of photography.
Izkata 3y ago
No, I can see it on Android without zooming in. Not well for sure, but it is there towards the corners.

ubercow13 3y ago

The authors point is that if you are making this tech, you should have educated eyes. And given all the confident comments in this thread claiming the author is full of shit and there's no difference, I think their frustration is justified? If you can't see the difference in the first images that's fine but you probably shouldn't be confidently claiming to know better than the author, let alone designing an image codec.

Pxtl 3y ago
Still, the author could do more to highlight the differences using zooms and annotations. The banding in the background is particularly strong and would help their point to highlight visually to the reader.
BackBlast 3y ago
There's room for different opinions. His font choice is terrible for my legibility. Maybe for others it's great. But it made the already difficult article that much harder to read. And I like this topic. I already seriously question his sense of what is reasonable and good and for what purpose. His purposes are so alien to mine that his opinion ends up being pretty irrelevant to mine. I wish him well with his. I can't see the things he's pointing out in the images, and I tried and tried. I use webp extensively, there have been zero complaints from users about the images. But I don't make art sites. I make software people use to get stuff done. I don't transfer images above maybe 50-80k. Art, aside from modest marketing, is most definitely not the point.
- ubercow13 3y ago
  If you tried and couldn't see, it might be like others say that it's more visible on certain monitors and setups. But then, again - if you are designing codecs or choosing them, you probably want a monitor that makes it easy to see these things. I can see them on my old iPhone screen. It reminds me of how sometimes you see a huge billboard hideously strong 10 foot wide JPEG compression artifacts. It was someone's job to make those, too.
  - BackBlast 3y ago
    > But then, again - if you are designing codecs or choosing them, you probably want a monitor that makes it easy to see these things You keep bringing this up. I don't really care. Someone designing a codec may have put this apparent problem case on the don't-care list as well. I would be in general agreement with the designer's priorities for a reasonable web codec. I have, with some care, selected webp as a general codec for web use on most of my sites. Nobody is complaining, and my page weights and development speed is improved. I don't have to fret between png+transparency and jpg to minimize asset size while maintaining it's usability. I just use webp and most of the time it's a size/speed win with good enough quality. Not every codec needs to be artist and photographer approved.

izacus 3y ago

For starters, anyone that ever worked with a codec, will know that you don't compare them with ONE SINNGLE IMAGE. This whole basic idea of the blog post is just to generate more whining and clicks and not to actually make a comparison between formats that's worth a basic smell test.

acdha 3y ago
This cuts against WebP more: all of Google’s marketing was “it’s a third smaller!!!!” and then when you looked they were comparing it to unoptimized libjpeg outout and using computational metrics like SSIM which only crudely approximate what humans notice about image quality. I did the same comparison the author did when WebP came out but used an optimized JPEG encoder and found the same conclusion: when you produced subjectively equivalent images, the savings were more like -10% to +15% and for web sites which didn’t get Google-scale traffic the performance impact was negative since it made caching less effective and you had to support an entire new toolchain.
- izacus 3y ago
  In what way does "anything cut" against anything when you do cherry picked single datum point comparison? There isn't a codec pair in this world where you can't make a cherry picked comparison where one of them is worse (I've done plenty of those).
  - acdha 3y ago
    Criticism of cherry-picking cuts against WebP because the marketing campaign for that codec relied on cherry-picking both the least optimized JPEG codec and the most favorable metrics for comparison. If you had humans comparing images or enabled JPEG optimization you saw far less exciting numbers for WebP - usually under 10% savings, not uncommonly negative – and there were other formats which consistently outperformed it. You can see the mood around that time here: https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2014/mozjpeg-3-0/ https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2014/mozjpeg-3-0/ Even a decade later, however, Google repeats the 25-34% claim and their performance tools tell developers they should use a modern format, which by sheer coincidence means the one they invented rather than the best ones on the market.

djha-skin 3y ago

I too am on Android. I was able to see it without full screening. Look at the man with his face screwed up. Look at the edges of his shirt near his shoulders. In the pictures that had bad image quality, there is a sort of glow around his shoulders, as if they are backlit. In the pictures that had a good image quality, The gradient was smooth. There was no backlit glow around his shoulders; it just looked like a smooth gradient background image. To be clear, I'm not a photographer. I'm a DevOps engineer. The last time I professionally wrote a line of JavaScript was at least 11 years ago. It's easy enough to see.