WebP Image Quality Issues

[showler]

This whole thread makes me realize why I was such a failure in art.  Blind as a bat, apparently.

[NevverSWL]

2 hours ago, MrMason said:

Thanks for raising this, what has happened here is that whilst optimising another part of the website we found some configuration that wasn't what we expected - specifically that we had .webp quality on all images set to 90 when the .webp default is 75. This results in some very large images that do not give a good experience to the majority of users.

We have updated that configuration and did some light touch testing on images and mod images to see what the effect was and we were struggling to see much difference so we deployed the change.

Looking at the examples you've provided we can see that 75 is too aggressive when displaying the full images and we'll look at increasing this quality either back to the 90 that it was before or see what else we can do.

I think it's highly likely that we'll be keeping all thumbnails on 75 quality as it's considerably faster for users to load the images.

I'll report back here in a few days when we've made the change ( the configuration & testing isn't as simple as it sounds! ).

Awesome! I have no problem with thumbnails being squashed but, at least in screenshot posts, unless someone posts additional images from outside resources, I think most people are comfortable with a single shot up to 1 mb at 1920x1080 which would be pretty generous for file size before being overkill.

I do understand where you're coming from about UX though; I rarely visit this one thread at CDPR's forums because people are posting up to 10 PNG files typically ranging from 2-3 mb each; now factor in that there are 20 posts to a page.  There are some great shots there, but opening a page is an exercise in patience and maybe even time management.

[megaman2k]

Just adding more data in case it's helpful:

1. The compression is quite noticeable on my 1920x1080 monitor. It is still noticeable on my Pixel 5 (albeit less so due to physical dimensions).
2. The original images are 1920x1080 .png files.
3. This affects many of my mod images. Just a few examples are listed below.

• Example 1: Compressed Original
• Example 2: Compressed Original
• Example 3: Compressed Original

Edit: Gotta open these on desktop or maybe download on mobile. The drive mobile viewer is just garbage.

Edited July 30 by megaman2k
Note on opening

[AndalayBay]

6 hours ago, showler said:

This whole thread makes me realize why I was such a failure in art.  Blind as a bat, apparently.

Me too! I'm not seeing what most folks are complaining about. Perhaps that's a good thing in this case?

[Steevie11]

Title says it all. I have screenshots that are good quality pngs, then when I upload them the result is blurry and compressed. I see a lot of screenshots in the media tab that are perfect quality and I'm not sure what I'm missing.

[Pickysaurus]

@Steevie11 I've merged your thread with the existing thread about the same thing. Please take a read of the recommended post at the top of the page. 

[NevverSWL]

It seems that images are back to looking good. Thank you so much!

[MrMason]

We're still working on this, new images from the last few days are being served at wepb at 90% quality to make sure the quality is there. The problem with this is that the increase in bandwidth and cache this causes is around 10x what it costs at 75% quality. This also means that loading times are 10x longer!

We've had an idea to try and use AVIF instead of webp, so we're just testing that out, and it's looking pretty promising for static images.
We're looking at something like 75% quality on AVIF which is as good as, or better then, 90% quality at webp whilst also being smaller in file size.

There's still some more testing to do, and we won't make any sweeping changes before the weekend.

 

[NevverSWL]

Thank you for digging into this, much appreciated.

The avif file shows up as an attachment rather than an inline image in my browser though. I downloaded it and just double-clicked on the file and Windows' native image viewer which gave the message that "The AV1 Video Extension is required to display this file" with a link to download and install it. After installing the extension, I was able to open it in the photo viewer, but it still wouldn't display inline with any of my browsers (Brave, Chrome, Opera). 

[MrMason]

The forum doesn't seem very happy attaching AVIFs it seems ( as 3rd party software it has its own entire image suite ) so I just removed all of that from my post.

AVIF has almost as much support as .webp - so should render in your browser - https://caniuse.com/avif