Lossy image compression: Fidelity vs Appeal

[Jon Sneyers]

I wrote a blogpost, in which I am making the point that "quality" is a conflated notion and that we should rather think in terms of "fidelity" and "appeal".

Opinions welcome!

https://cloudinary.com/blog/what_to_...lity_or_appeal

[Jyrki Alakuijala]

"fidelity" and "appeal".

+1

Photoshopping can be fun and useful, but it needs to be a separate and optional layer, not automatically build into compression.

In my view compression should have only one role: deliver the image as small as possible, but don't auto-beautify it on the way. Don't attempt to make a decision where to put the bits -- like not many bits on the sky as the algorithm just doesn't know if the photographer wants to capture the cirrocumulus patterns or if there is a dramatic effect from the sky that helps to set up the stage for the rest of the photograph. Don't remove wrinkles, speckles of dust, unnecessary bolts, don't be unpredictable like remove tiling patterns from red walls (but not from gray, brown, orange, yellow or green walls), don't auto-make-up the face, don't remove bolts from technical structure, don't remove the crack from the engine block, don't destroy the face of a person of color because your dark shades modeling is not up-to-par, don't take the beauty away from us, don't make a marble statue to look like plastic.

Lossy image compression should work with a least-surprises principle.

[Jarek]

Extreme case of low-fidelity high-appeal "compressor" could be replacing ugly photos with different pretty ones