Flying Over Bar Harbor
July 21, 2001

This is a discussion of graphics enhancement and compression, click if you just want to see the enhanced pictures of flying over Bar Harbor or the original pictures.

I've been making graphic web pages for 10 years, but am still very sensitive to the size of graphic files because for several months a year I have to use a dial-up line.

I've found the compression with ACDSee 7 is much better than most other programs (or earlier versions of ACDSee). In fact it is so much better that files 800 pixels wide are about the same size as 640 pixel wide files produced by other programs. (Elements 3 doesn't seem to have better compression than Elements 2. I haven't tested Photoshop CS 2, but will soon.)

Recently I've been very impressed with the automatic enhancement using Bibble, but am sorry to say the compression is not nearly as good as ACDSee. Guess for now I'll consider using a combination of both ... those results are near the middle of the first table below.

I picked these images to experiment with just because they looked so poor. As you see, the enhanced versions produced by Bibble look much better!

The problem is that unless you use a quality of at least 50 for the Bibble JPG output, the images are just not acceptable for display on my web pages. The Bibble file sizes are almost twice those of the ACDSee files, and about 50% larger than files produced by ACDSee after the images have been enhanced by Bibble.

The table below show the relative file sizes for 9 similar images. You can see a comparison of one of the images below, or all 9 of a particular kind by clicking in this table:

Note that the "profiles" add about 3K to the file size ... the difference between lines 6 and 7 above. I haven't yet explored the advantages including the profile in the output file, but doubt very much it has any value on a web page.

Just for the sake of completeness, the table below shows the original file sizes using a Nikon 990 camera, and the intermediate files produced by Bibble at full size and a quality of 95...

Original 640x480 image as posted 4 years ago

ACDSee 7, No Enhancement, Quality 15

Bibble, No Enhancement, Quality 15 Note the unacceptable artifacts of compression. Compare with the ACDSee image above which is about the same file size.

Bibble, with Enhancement, Quality 15

Bibble, with Enhancement, Quality 30 You can still see some compression artifacts.

Bibble, with Enhancement, Quality 50

Bibble, with Enhancement, Quality 50, with Profile

ThumbsPlus enhancement using Histogram Streach and Unsharp Mask, Quality 50 The results of the ThumbsPlus batch enhancements weren't as good. I tried several different enhancement techniques, some of other results were quite poor. What impressed me with Bibble is that the default enhancements were almost always better than the original.

Bibble Enhancement, ACDSee 7 compression, Quality 15

Repeat of original for comparison (ACDSee 7, No Enhancement, Quality 15)

 
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For other pictures, click on graphics, or Wren's Photo Albums June's Photo Albums Cherryfield.US