File Compression

The assignment due tonight was to evaluate 5 images and to determine how they can best be compressed. Compression of images for the web is an all-important topic. Both the style and the quality of the compression determines how fast the images download, and hence how user-friendly is the website. It does no good to have quality images if they take so long to access that no one sees them! That being said, I must admit that this is my weakest skill in photography. Well, almost...

The problem I had for this assignment is that my "eye" is not that good! I really couldn't tell the qualitative differences between compressing a jpg photo at quality-60 vs. quality-70, or compressing a gif file with selective vs. adaptive reduction. I found this exercise excrutiating. Even when I enlarged images 200%, I couldn't always tell whether A or B was the better choice (kind of reminds me of the difficulty of the eye doctor's exam...).

As I said, this is my weakest photographic skill - almost. That's because the whole arena of color-correcting a photo is another difficulty, and it's just as, or even more, critical. What this essentially means is that my visual skills are not all that great! Sigh. It's a sad thing to have to admit, but there it is. What I have going for me, in the field of photography, is more than anything my interest and my eagerness. With that, I keep trying to get better photos, and to improve my editing skills. But I've also discovered that it's great to have a live-in editor! What I don't see may be obvious to my partner, and that really helps a lot.

Meanwhile, I'll continue taking classes and learning about photo editing - and hope that someone else will do it!

Here's a link to the images we evaluated.