Friday, August 31, 2007

Jay Effing Pegs

Oh, authors, do you have a sec? I know you think you're doing everyone a huge favor by saving that image with the "smallest file" setting, but all you're really doing is making me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon.

Go and open one of those files, Jackson. I'll wait.

See how your image looks like crap now? Mmhm. See all those dots? Yeah... see the thing about the JPEG format is that it uses lossy compression. If you're trying to make it look like Seurat took that picture, then well done. But if you're shooting for a quality level that says "respected scientific journal" rather than "elementary school book report", you have failed.

Let's go back to that word "lossy", because it's important. It means that when the JPEG fairy squishes your file, she tosses out all of the stuffing, and by "stuffing" I mean "the bits that make your picture not look terrible". And then she burns them with napalm and salts the earth behind her as she flies away laughing, and I can't get those bits back to make your picture look not terrible again.

If we start having a shortage of ones and zeros, then by all means, compress the hell out of those files. Until then, nimrod, storage is dirt cheap. How about if you let a professional decide how small your file needs to be?

Hey. Look over there in my coffee cup...

It's a spoon.

3 comments:

Johnny Yen said...

I'm mailing you some more coffee immediately. Proabably some shots. Sounds like you need it.

Coaster Punchman said...

Hey Deadspot, thanks for the tips on moving my music over to my new computer. It's a bit tricky since I have two separate collections that I want to merge. Haven't gotten to it yet (like I ever will) but I know where to turn now.

Hey, once you're done solving this JPEG problem would you also do something about the damn Vista problem with reading card drives? F*ckers!

deadspot said...

You're a good man, Mr. Yen.

I did a little research. Here's your Vista solution, CP.