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vladdanilov

> For high quality photography purposes jpeg is bordering on useless

> Use WebP! For everything!

Jyrki Alakuijala, one of the creators of WebP, on WebP vs JPEG [1]:

>> For high quality photography, I (and butteraugli) believe that JPEG is actually better than WebP.

>> Below JPEG quality 77 WebP lossy wins, above JPEG quality 77 JPEG wins (for photography).

>> This was based on the maximum compression artefact in an image -- averaging from 1000 images.

Better meaning here [2]:

>> Faster decode (up to around 6x faster) and less bytes needed at high quality (in comparison to butteraugli scores).

[1] https://encode.ru/threads/2905-Diverse-third-party-ecosystem...

[2] https://encode.ru/threads/2905-Diverse-third-party-ecosystem...

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"For high quality photography, I (and butteraugli) believe that JPEG is actually better than WebP."

That's interesting. Of course, the subjective part of that is one person's take, and the "objective" part of it is pointless because the whole point of Guetzli (the jpeg encoder) is to try to maximize the Butteraugli score, so saying that WebP gets a lower score is not significant.

Personally, WebP looks a lot better to me in the direct tests of equal file size that I've seen. It even looks better than Pik, which is Google's experimental successor to Jpeg that also uses Butteraugli.

And it would be odd, to say the least, if a codec from the early nineties could beat a modern one on Intra-frame coding, which has been a subject of immense research over the years.

Take a look at some of these for yourself. https://wyohknott.github.io/image-formats-comparison/

Like MP3 encoders, JPEG encoders have only gotten better over the years, perhaps they’ve fewer bugs or compromises for compression? Also, there are newer standards for JPEG including JPEG2000 and JPEG XR, etc. Plus many other alternatives: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o...

So my advice is encode in multiple formats to achieve the broadest browser support and the best image quality/size trade off that you’re willing to allow. That said... it does sort of bug me that every couple years we have to revisit which codecs we’re using because the implementations keep marching on...

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