I know that! I didn't know about the photoshop bit (never been the artist type), but I remember there was a format (I think it was GIF?) where you actually defined a small set of colors and you'd only use those, so the image was lighter.
That's why I was surprised when the reduced images were heavier than the original ones! I was expecting JPG to somehow profit from the reduction.
Gif, indeed. And eight bit PNGs. They are using simplified palette of colors (so 1 byte instead of 3 or 4) to reduce the size, then apply some kind of dictionary compression (i'm not strict here) to reduce the size, so that large areas of the same color can be effectively compressed.
JPG on the other hand benefits from cosine transform, it's about expressing the image as a set of waves, solid color is difficult to compress because it needs many waves to cancel each other. Quite a lot of math is happening there. In general, jpg compresses by dropping details and having simple gradients. The whole jpgalgorithm is well designed and it's pitfalls are interesting to explore. You experienced such case.
You can do an experiment and compress a picture with jpg 75% quality or and over again. After enough iterations you should see some artifacts and disortions.
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I know that! I didn't know about the photoshop bit (never been the artist type), but I remember there was a format (I think it was GIF?) where you actually defined a small set of colors and you'd only use those, so the image was lighter.
That's why I was surprised when the reduced images were heavier than the original ones! I was expecting JPG to somehow profit from the reduction.
Gif, indeed. And eight bit PNGs. They are using simplified palette of colors (so 1 byte instead of 3 or 4) to reduce the size, then apply some kind of dictionary compression (i'm not strict here) to reduce the size, so that large areas of the same color can be effectively compressed.
JPG on the other hand benefits from cosine transform, it's about expressing the image as a set of waves, solid color is difficult to compress because it needs many waves to cancel each other. Quite a lot of math is happening there. In general, jpg compresses by dropping details and having simple gradients. The whole jpgalgorithm is well designed and it's pitfalls are interesting to explore. You experienced such case.
You can do an experiment and compress a picture with jpg 75% quality or and over again. After enough iterations you should see some artifacts and disortions.