IU Art the Size and The Quality of An Image in Brochures Discussion

Discussion – Lossy vs Lossless Images Background In today’s world, you are likely to purchase stock photography for your projects. It is tempting to download the .jpg provided and begin to reformat it directly for your projects. This is not recommended – and here’s why. Every time you open and resave a .jpg, the information within it is diminished. You are literally throwing pixels away with every single save as command. Files formatted as .jpg have a lossy compression attached to them. This means the original data is not preserved. Lossless is a second compression system that preserves original data. Lossless files are larger, and that is why it is often not utilized, particularly online. Here is a short video that does an excellent job of explaining the difference between lossy and lossless compression. Notice how the narrator describes the different compressions and their effect. Much of what he explains will help you with this week’s discussion.Understanding lossy and lossless compression (Links to an external site.)(3:55 min)You are once again working with the client from week 3. You’ve gotten the job and have recreated their logo as a vector file. You are now ready to move on to work on brochures, billboards and more. The owner of the company points you to their website once again for assets, telling you that the website is the only place they have photos to use.For your initial post, please address the following questions:REPLY :Kenya CromwellThe photos from the website can work depending on the resolution. If it’s good quality or not (which file format it is saved in) will help me decide whether to convert it to a TIFF, PNG, JPEG, etc. I will have to choose if I should use lossy or lossless compression. I will have to explain to the client that depending on which photos I use, I have to do the best to get the best quality for printing and billboards. If it’s a JPEG, it will lose original data and all the assets will not be preserved. Files that are larger will be able to keep original data (lossless compression system). Lossy and lossless compression figures into this because lossless formats save the image in maximum image quality, resulting in a larger file. Images that will be printed are usually saved in this format. Lossy formats discard information when its saved, and you can never return it to its previous form; it’ll be more pixelated.Understanding lossy and lossless compression.John ShieldsFor this weeks discussion we were asked to continue working with the same client as last week. We are now moving on to several projects like brochures and billboards. We’ve been instructed to take the images from the clients web site considering they are the only ones they’ve really ever had. It’s important for the client to understand what issues we might be facing. Consider the difference between lossy and lossless image formatting. Depending on how the images on the site were formatted, will determine the quality of the projects we are soon to be working on. If we use their images, but the images aren’t lossless files such as PNG for example, they won’t be acceptable due to the loss of data. In the event that their images are lossy formatted and they still insist on using those images, they will need to understand that there is no way to go back to the images original state. The only solutions would be for them to find those original image files, or to pick new images all together. Might be a tough pill to swallow for this client, but it’s better to do what’s right than to do what’s easy. I have hope that the client will understand we’re only trying to keep their content as professional and appealing as possible. Where other designers in the past might not have even brought these issues up to them, might play a part in why they came to us to begin with. The truth is we’re trained professionals. At the end of the day, we need to do what we were trained to do. No excuses. “Print graphics are much less forgiving of artifacting and low image quality than are on-screen graphics. Where a JPEG saved at medium quality might look just fine on your monitor, when printed out, even on an inkjet printer, the loss in quality is noticeable (as is the artifacting).” (Chapman, n.d.)References:Cameron Chapman – Everything You Need to Know About Image Compression