Technology
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PNG started out as ZIP(BMP) and hasn't gotten that much better. Use JPEG. The pixels you lose are not worth crying about
I use 4k because I like seeing a lot of stuff at the same time in good quality.
I make screenshots of my whole screen to share all the stuff in the highest detail.
Using jpeg would result in literally unreadable pictures.
Depends on the Quality setting and version of jpeg. Even the original jpeg, on high quality, will result in little to no data loss. IIRC, Jpeg can even do lossless, with the only caveat being that it doesn't save alpha channels (but screenshots don't need to have transparency, anyway). Newer versions of jpeg, such as jpeg-2000 (and the much less broadly supported jpeg-XL) have much better compression and provide higher image quality at lower file size.
"jpegification" or "Deep-frying" only really occurs with the original jpeg at low quality settings.
JPEG for graphics like screenshots is not very efficient. For stuff like that, png is simply superior. (But not with compression 0)
PNG is not good for photos though.
why though? The graphics represented in the screen are already squashed and scaled, so you wouldn't be preserving their quality in any case. If you're worried about text, JPEG should still be able to handle it under high quality settings
We can ask the same the other way around: why do you want to use jpg if it results in a bigger size and worse quality than png?
But that's patently untrue: take this 10 MB example TIFF file as an example.
PNG Compression, max compress (=quality 9):
JPG Encoding, 99% quality (=quality 99):
Final file size comparison:
PNG is significantly larger, and difference in quality between them is negligible
png - jpg
jpg with 80% compression, via krita.
As B0rax said, for screenshots, png is better - it can represent line graphics and text more efficiently.
Thanks for this. Still, I would be curious to see this for a 4K level image. Also I wonder if your screenshot tool did a bitmap copy of the screen or intrinsically converted it to PNG first before pasting it into your paint editor.
Dude. Did you even read what I wrote? PNG is bad for photos. Your example is a photo. Go ahead and try the same with a screenshot with text and menus showing.
Or they could just compression for their PNGs. PNG is a lossless format so they'll only lose a fraction of a second during creation.