Why does compressing an image or GIF create noise in previously-solid areas? Surely that requires MORE information to be stored?
In: Technology
Actually, JPEG compression creates artifacts because it uses patterns to recreate the image. By encoding less data the algorithm is forced to use less accurate patterns to represent the missing information. The noise is part of the algoritm, not the data.
GIF color reduction (quantization) reduces data by approximating colors to a smaller palette. This can have the effect that the colors do not look like what they originally were, and not blending in with surrounding pixels due to the color component distances. This, to our attuned brains, makes the images look “noisy”. But in fact we instead have reduced color data.
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