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c/digital-art-showcasemiasanchezmiasanchez6d agoProlific Poster

Found a stat about JPEG compression that blew my mind

I was digging into image file sizes for an art showcase submission last week and read that JPEG compression can drop file size by 80% with almost no visible loss. Found it on a photography forum where a guy tested 100 different images. It made me rethink saving everything as PNG for my portfolio. Has anyone else noticed quality differences with high compression on detailed pieces?
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kellygrant
My buddy Mark tried to save his digital paintings at 90% compression once for a game jam upload and his character's face turned into a blocky mess with weird color streaks around the eyes lol. He spent like 2 hours redoing it because he didn't keep the original PNG. I think for most stuff 80% is fine but those really detailed brush strokes get trashed fast.
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logan_wood
Did you try cranking it even higher than 80% for those detailed pieces? I messed around with this exact thing last month when I was uploading some old fan art to a free hosting site. I had this one drawing with a ton of small, sharp textures in the background, and at 80% compression it actually looked fine on my screen. But then I tried 95% just to see what would happen, and the whole thing turned into a mess of weird color blotches and jagged edges, kind of like someone smeared paint over a broken mirror. Your buddy Mark's experience sounds exactly like what I ran into, those little brush strokes and fine details just get destroyed the second you push it past a certain point. So yeah, 80% is about the max I'd ever go for anything I actually care about.
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pat_roberts55
Reminds me of what @kellygrant said about her friend Mark, because my buddy Dave did the same thing with his comic book style art. He pushed it to 95% to save space on a portfolio site and all his crosshatching turned into a blurry soup. He learned the hard way to keep a backup PNG after that mess.
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