[CharlesW]

> And my experience is that AVIF falls down at that, it does not really save bits compared to JPEG and WEBP at high quality.

In all the comparisons I've seen, it's not even a contest.

"I picked this image because it's a photo with a mixture of low frequency detail (the road) and high frequency detail (parts of the car livery). Also, there are some pretty sharp changes of colour between the red and blue. And I like F1.

Roughly speaking, at an acceptable quality, the WebP is almost half the size of JPEG, and AVIF is under half the size of WebP. I find it incredible that AVIF can do a good job of the image in just 18 kB."

https://jakearchibald.com/2020/avif-has-landed/

It'd be interesting to see file size comparisons of AVIF lossless images vs. JPEG's "almost lossless" 100% compression, but I haven't run across any yet.

[majormajor]

That seems like a bad image for the stuff the OP is talking about - large print high detail stuff - since it's so small, but the AVIF "acceptable" still, even at low res, seems to be clearly throwing away detail compared to the JPEG "acceptable". Look at how the JPEG preserves some of the body seam in the second "l" in RedBull, for instance. So ok, it's a quarter the size, but they aren't showing me how big an AVIF with the same detail as the JPEG would be.

They're just showing that it can do a less-offensive job of erasing detail smoothly to take filesizes down to tiny levels than WebP or JPEG? But "tiniest size with least offense" is VERY different than "best size with greatest detail."

[PaulHoule]

Exactly, that's what I'm talking about.

For some applications people would be really happy with that F1 car image and I would even be happy with it for some applications (e.g. some random image to give spice to a blog) but for my photograph I'd say that's pretty lossy.

[PaulHoule]

It's a Jedi mind trick.

The compression artifacts in the self-shadows of the red bit of the car to the left of the driver's head look awful to me. It's true that the compression artifact blends in pretty well and you might think the car really looks like that but personally I can't unsee things like that once I look at them in comparison.

The thing is that it is that play of reflections and shadows that makes an expensive sports car look so sexy.

[CharlesW]

> It's a Jedi mind trick.

All compression is. :^) The additional twist is that our eyes/brains do a great job at glossing over compression artifacts that we're used to.

When you expand the image, you can change the formats on both sides for A/B testing. Comparing "JPEG - 20.7 kB" to "AVIF - 18.2 kB" is an enlightening like-vs-like size comparison.

I'd be happy to do an AVIF encode of a large uncompressed/losslessly compressed image that meets your "near visually lossless" bar. I'm assuming that JPEG must do better in comparison to AVIF at large file sizes, but I can't find good examples of this.

[account42]

> Comparing "JPEG - 20.7 kB" to "AVIF - 18.2 kB" is an enlightening like-vs-like size comparison.

You can't extrapolate that comparison to higher bitrates though - so unless your use case doesn't require preserving image detail (i.e. the images might as well not be there), both formats are inadequate at that size.

[yakubin]

This "acceptable quality" photo at the top in AVIF made me initially think someone took a blurry photo. I only understood what happened after switching to original and JPEG, which look much better. So this is an apples-and-oranges comparison IMO. I'd never use that AVIF version on my photography website.

[JyrkiAlakuijala]

I don't enjoy seeing compression artefacts or blur or other loss of detail.

I don't want the internet to look like that F1 car to save a few milliseconds or $0.0000001 for the company sending the pic to me.

I certainly don't want my family photos to look like that.

I don't want the photographs on the internet to become much faster, much cheaper and much worse. I'd like them to become a bit faster, a bit cheaper, but also more crisp, vivid, emotionally engaging, and realistic.