Every compressed picture is a trade made on your behalf, usually by a default nobody chose. These articles show where the bytes actually go, what a quality setting really costs, and how much of the damage can be taken back.
Photo Editing
Dithering Side by Side: Why Atkinson Looks Like a Mac and Bayer Like a Game
Eight dithering methods on one picture, with the same palette and the same options. Every kernel and divisor written out, the Bayer matrix built by recursion, and the linear light step that almost every quick implementation skips.
Spend your JPEG bits where the eye looks, not evenly across the frame
An encoder gives the hedge behind your subject as many bits as the subject. A saliency model knows better, but a browser will not let you set quality per region, so the encoder is not steered: its input is prepared instead. On the sample that was 41 per cent off the file at an unchanged quality setting.
Repair a photo that messengers and re-saves have turned to blocks
JPEG damage is not random. It is made in blocks of eight by eight pixels, in a known order, which is why a model trained on compressed images beats any amount of sharpening. It runs in your browser, repairs at four times the size and hands the result back clean.
Remove Moire From a Scanned Image: Why Blurring Never Works
A scanned magazine page shows a wavy pattern that was never on the paper: the print screen beating against the scanner's sample grid. Blurring trades one problem for a worse one. Measuring the screen in a frequency picture and notching out exactly those frequencies does not, and the workbench in this article does it in your browser tab.
Upload Simulator: What WordPress Actually Writes to Disk
One 3000 by 2000 photo becomes eight files on disk. A 1200 by 800 photo becomes five. Drop your own file in and see exactly which registered sizes fire, which ones core refuses, what dimensions come out and what the whole set weighs.
An enormous amount of what people need to see is a picture of a screen, and most of those pictures are worse than they need to be for reasons that take seconds to fix.
How Big Should an Image Actually Be Before You Upload It
A 4032 pixel phone photograph in a 760 pixel column makes the browser download 12.2 million pixels to paint about 430,000 of them. What that costs in bytes and in memory, how to read the display width your theme actually uses, where the WordPress 2560 pixel safety net stops, and a browser tool that does the resizing before the upload.
Image Quality Curve: Why Every Recommended Setting Is Wrong
Quality 80 means one thing in JPEG, another in WebP, and something different again on a screenshot than on a photograph. Here is what the number actually sets, what SSIM can and cannot tell you, and how to find the point where your own file stops getting meaningfully smaller and starts getting visibly worse.
How to Edit Images in WordPress With the Built In Editor
WordPress has a built in image editor most people never open. Here is what every control does, exactly which files a save writes to disk, where the backup of your original lives, and why the Apply changes to radio buttons vanished.
