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Butterfly VS Quality
 
One of JPEG's strengths is supposed to be in their ability to compress detailed photographs without compromising the image's quality too much. To test this, an image of a butterfly resting on a cone flower was chosen and saved using multiple quality settings.

An additional benefit of this specific image is that there's a large area of almost solid color in the upper left, which should be easily compressed compared to the more detailed portions of the butterfly's wings.

This image is 92.7 KB when saved as a 100% quality JPEG.


Quality Examples

75% Quality

Base Image

 Compressed Image: 19.6 KB
 Difference: 31.4%
Saving this image at 75% drastically lowered the file's size without causing noticable changes to the image itself. This would be a good choice for preparing images for display online.

50% Quality

Base Image

 Compressed Image: 13.7 KB
 Difference: 37.7%
Although the butterfly and flower don't seem to have changed much, the solid background is starting to show signs of breaking up. This might be worth the extra 5 KB if it's not an important image on a website.

25% Quality

Base Image

 Compressed Image: 9.64 KB
 Difference: 43.4%
Reducing the quality to 25% has created visible artifacting throughout the image, but it could still be considered passable.

10% Quality

Base Image

 Compressed Image: 5.93 KB
 Difference: 64.8%
At this point, the file has been reduced to just 6% of its original size, but the heavy artifacting is not worth it.

0% Quality

Base Image

 Compressed Image: 3.20 KB
 Difference: 93.0%
Nobody would really try saving an image using this low quality, but doing so does showcase just how much can be lost through overzealous compression.


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