Avoiding Compression Artifacts in Images and Videos
When you save a file with very low quality, visual defects such as blocks, noise, or dirty colors appear. These compression artifacts make your work look careless and reduce its impact. To understand how to avoid them, it's essential to know how lossy formats like JPEG or MPEG work, which discard data to reduce size. 🖼️
Preventing Artifacts When Exporting
The main strategy is to work and save your master projects in lossless formats. When you need to export for web or delivery, adjust the settings to maintain maximum visual fidelity.
Good Practices Guide:- Use formats like PNG, TIFF, or EXR for static images and image sequences for video during the production and archiving phase.
- When exporting to JPEG, set a quality value of 90 or higher to avoid visible blocks forming.
- For video, choose high bitrates and efficient codecs like H.264 in High profile or H.265 to better preserve details and motion.
Lossy compression is a trade-off: you sacrifice information to reduce file size. The trick is to sacrifice only what the eye doesn't easily perceive.
Fixing Artifacts in Already Compressed Files
If you already have an image or video with these defects, the options to correct them are limited, since the original information is lost. You can apply techniques to mask the artifacts, but the definitive solution is to go back to the high-quality source file.
Methods to Mask Defects:- Apply a very light Gaussian blur or a specific filter to reduce noise. This softens block edges but also reduces sharpness.
- Try AI tools for resampling or upscaling images, available in some editors, which can plausibly reconstruct details.
- Remember that these are palliative solutions. The most effective action is always to find and use the original uncompressed version to generate a new export.
Finding the Final Balance
The constant challenge is to balance a sufficiently lightweight file that loads quickly on a web portfolio, but with impeccable visual quality that doesn't resemble a pixelated mosaic. Mastering this balance between file size and visual integrity is a fundamental skill in the digital workflow. ⚖️