WebP Image Quality Issues

[megaman2k]

On 8/21/2024 at 4:11 AM, Pickysaurus said:

We've reverted to WebP 90% quality for now, but we will continue testing AVIF at some point in the next few weeks (the developers working on this are on annual leave). 

FYI, something's up with the reverted quality for older uploads. An example from my mod:

• old upload
• new upload (same source image)

Hopefully the AVIF update works out. Thanks for the update!

[AaronOfMpls]

17 minutes ago, megaman2k said:

FYI, something's up with the reverted quality for older uploads. An example from my mod:

• old upload
• new upload (same source image)

Hopefully the AVIF update works out. Thanks for the update!

I see, the old upload is slightly blurred -- especially with details like the guy's arm hair in the middle.

EDIT: It's also less than half the file size, ~70 KB vs ~176 KB.

Edited August 26 by AaronOfMpls

[daniilmaks]

I have to add the report that webp has completely annihilated the quality of all the images I've uploaded that were specifically made to showcase dithering and the quality of my texture work. It's straight up gross.

I get it that you guys need to cut bandwidth costs but webp was not an upgrade to jpeg back then, and it's not an upgrade today, it's a side-grade with serious drawbacks and several edge cases with clearly worse quality.

Please do not bother with lossy webp. Either ensure the pngs are fully optimized, or jump all the way to jxl or avif like what seems to be in the works. You can also use lossless webp to replace png right now, as it provides about 10-20% size reduction while remaining lossless.

I'd like to suggest jxl because it's an order of magnitude faster to encode than avif at equivalent quality settings, however we're waiting for google to either get smacked by the EU or yield to the pressure of the rest of the industry.

Edited October 19 by daniilmaks

[ahzidaljun]

could there be a compromise where the first 5 images of a mod are not subject to this really harsh compression? i understand the primary concern is page load speed, but for graphically oriented mods where you wanna showcase fidelity, you're gonna have to start linking to external galleries or embeds, where fine detail grain won't become banding or completely blurred

 

[BellCube]

After some recent discussion in the Mod Authors server, I had an idea. Perhaps mod authors could be presented with two options:

• Lossy-compressed Images, which load with the page
• Losslessly-compressed images, which load in the background after the page is loaded

Introducing author control would allow a mod author to individually control the user experience of their mod page, just as their own mods. But, how exactly would these two options work from a technical perspective?

There's a lot of talk about how to do lazy-loading for images. My suggestion for Nexus would be to serve small thumbnails for the image carousels (as you already do!) and, for the lossless images, defer loading them until a few seconds after the main JS executes. I would suggest using <link rel="preload" href="..." /> to perhaps load the lossless images early, but this might adversely affect users' internet data limits. Maybe you could defer loading lossless images until after the user opens the image browser—loading as many lossless images as possible once they open it.

However this is implemented, though, I would love to see this tradeoff given to authors. For things like texture overhauls, the compression artifacts in an image can make or break the selling point of the mod.