Amiga Plus 1995 #2

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ Amiga Plus 1995 #2 / Amiga Plus CD - 1995 - No. 2.iso / internet / faq / englisch / jpeg < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1995-04-11 | 74.1 KB | 1,447 lines

Archive-name: jpeg-faq/part1 Posting-Frequency: every 14 days Last-modified: 5 March 1995 This article answers Frequently Asked Questions about JPEG image compression. This is part 1, covering general questions and answers about JPEG. Part 2 gives system-specific hints and program recommendations. As always, suggestions for improvement of this FAQ are welcome. New since version of 13 November 1994: * Split the FAQ into two parts since it was approaching 64K. * Reformatted the FAQ to look better in the WWW FAQ archives. * New sections about progressive JPEG and M-JPEG. This article includes the following sections: Basic questions: [1] What is JPEG? [2] Why use JPEG? [3] When should I use JPEG, and when should I stick with GIF? [4] How well does JPEG compress images? [5] What are good "quality" settings for JPEG? [6] Where can I get JPEG software? [7] How do I view JPEG images posted on Usenet? More advanced questions: [8] What is color quantization? [9] What are some rules of thumb for converting GIF images to JPEG? [10] Does loss accumulate with repeated compression/decompression? [11] What is progressive JPEG? [12] Isn't there a lossless JPEG? [13] Why all the argument about file formats? [14] How do I recognize which file format I have, and what do I do about it? [15] How does JPEG work? [16] What about arithmetic coding? [17] Could an FPU speed up JPEG? How about a DSP chip? [18] Isn't there an M-JPEG standard for motion pictures? Miscellaneous: [19] Where are FAQ lists archived? This article and its companion are posted every 2 weeks. If you can't find part 2, you can get it from the news.answers archive at rtfm.mit.edu (see "[19] Where are FAQ lists archived?"). Part 2 changes very frequently; get a new copy if the one you are reading is more than a couple months old. ------------------------------ Subject: [1] What is JPEG? JPEG (pronounced "jay-peg") is a standardized image compression mechanism. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the original name of the committee that wrote the standard. JPEG is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale images of natural, real-world scenes. It works well on photographs, naturalistic artwork, and similar material; not so well on lettering, simple cartoons, or line drawings. JPEG handles only still images, but there is a related standard called MPEG for motion pictures. JPEG is "lossy," meaning that the decompressed image isn't quite the same as the one you started with. (There are lossless image compression algorithms, but JPEG achieves much greater compression than is possible with lossless methods.) JPEG is designed to exploit known limitations of the human eye, notably the fact that small color changes are perceived less accurately than small changes in brightness. Thus, JPEG is intended for compressing images that will be looked at by humans. If you plan to machine-analyze your images, the small errors introduced by JPEG may be a problem for you, even if they are invisible to the eye. A useful property of JPEG is that the degree of lossiness can be varied by adjusting compression parameters. This means that the image maker can trade off file size against output image quality. You can make *extremely* small files if you don't mind poor quality; this is useful for applications such as indexing image archives. Conversely, if you aren't happy with the output quality at the default compression setting, you can jack up the quality until you are satisfied, and accept lesser compression. Another important aspect of JPEG is that decoders can trade off decoding speed against image quality, by using fast but inaccurate approximations to the required calculations. Some viewers obtain remarkable speedups in this way. ------------------------------ Subject: [2] Why use JPEG? There are two good reasons: to make your image files smaller, and to store 24-bit-per-pixel color data instead of 8-bit-per-pixel data. Making image files smaller is a win for transmitting files across networks and for archiving libraries of images. Being able to compress a 2 Mbyte full-color file down to, say, 100 Kbytes makes a big difference in disk space and transmission time! And JPEG can easily provide 20:1 compression of full-color data. If you are comparing GIF and JPEG, the size ratio is usually more like 4:1 (see "[4] How well does JPEG compress images?"). If your viewing software doesn't support JPEG directly, you'll have to convert JPEG to some other format to view the image. Even with a JPEG-capable viewer, it takes longer to decode and view a JPEG image than to view an image of a simpler format such as GIF. Thus, using JPEG is essentially a time/space tradeoff: you give up some time in order to store or transmit an image more cheaply. But it's worth noting that when network or telephone transmission is involved, the time savings from transferring a shorter file can be greater than the time needed to decompress the file. The second fundamental advantage of JPEG is that it stores full color information: 24 bits/pixel (16 million colors). GIF, the other image format widely used on Usenet, can only store 8 bits/pixel (256 or fewer colors). GIF is reasonably well matched to inexpensive computer displays --- most run-of-the-mill PCs can't display more than 256 distinct colors at once. But full-color hardware is getting cheaper all the time, and JPEG images look *much* better than GIFs on such hardware. Within a couple of years, GIF will probably seem as obsolete as black-and-white MacPaint format does today. Furthermore, JPEG is far more useful than GIF for exchanging images among people with widely varying display hardware, because it avoids prejudging how many colors to use (see "[8] What is color quantization?"). Hence JPEG is considerably more appropriate than GIF for use as a Usenet posting standard. A lot of people are scared off by the term "lossy compression". But when it comes to representing real-world scenes, *no* digital image format can retain all the information that impinges on your eyeball. By comparison with the real-world scene, JPEG loses far less information than GIF. The real disadvantage of lossy compression is that if you repeatedly compress and decompress an image, you lose a little quality each time (see "[10] Does loss accumulate with repeated compression/decompression?"). This is a serious objection for some applications but matters not at all for many others. ------------------------------ Subject: [3] When should I use JPEG, and when should I stick with GIF? JPEG is *not* going to displace GIF entirely; for some types of images, GIF is superior in image quality, file size, or both. One of the first things to learn about JPEG is which kinds of images to apply it to. Generally speaking, JPEG is superior to GIF for storing full-color or gray-scale images of "realistic" scenes; that means scanned photographs and similar material. Any continuous variation in color, such as occurs in highlighted or shaded areas, will be represented more faithfully and in less space by JPEG than by GIF. GIF does significantly better on images with only a few distinct colors, such as line drawings and simple cartoons. Not only is GIF lossless for such images, but it often compresses them more than JPEG can. For example, large areas of pixels that are all *exactly* the same color are compressed very efficiently indeed by GIF. JPEG can't squeeze such data as much as GIF does without introducing visible defects. (One implication of this is that large single-color borders are quite cheap in GIF files, while they are best avoided in JPEG files.) Computer-drawn images, such as ray-traced scenes, usually fall between photographs and cartoons in terms of complexity. The more complex and subtly rendered the image, the more likely that JPEG will do well on it. The same goes for semi-realistic artwork (fantasy drawings and such). But icons that use only a few colors are handled better by GIF. JPEG has a hard time with very sharp edges: a row of pure-black pixels adjacent to a row of pure-white pixels, for example. Sharp edges tend to come out blurred unless you use a very high quality setting. Edges this sharp are rare in scanned photographs, but are fairly common in GIF files: consider borders, overlaid text, etc. The blurriness is particularly objectionable with text that's only a few pixels high. If you have a GIF with a lot of small-size overlaid text, don't JPEG it. (If you want to attach descriptive text to a JPEG image, put it in as a comment rather than trying to overlay it on the image. Most recent JPEG software can deal with textual comments in a JPEG file, although older viewers may just ignore the comments.) Plain black-and-white (two level) images should never be converted to JPEG; they violate all of the conditions given above. You need at least about 16 gray levels before JPEG is useful for gray-scale images. It should also be noted that GIF is lossless for gray-scale images of up to 256 levels, while JPEG is not. If you have a large library of GIF images, you may want to save space by converting the GIFs to JPEG. This is trickier than it may seem --- even when the GIFs contain photographic images, they are actually very poor source material for JPEG, because the images have been color-reduced. Non-photographic images should generally be left in GIF form. Good-quality photographic GIFs can often be converted with no visible quality loss, but only if you know what you are doing and you take the time to work on each image individually. Otherwise you're likely to lose a lot of image quality or waste a lot of disk space ... quite possibly both. Read sections 8 and 9 if you want to convert GIFs to JPEG. ------------------------------ Subject: [4] How well does JPEG compress images? Very well indeed, when working with its intended type of image (photographs and suchlike). For full-color images, the uncompressed data is normally 24 bits/pixel. The best known lossless compression methods can compress such data about 2:1 on average. JPEG can typically achieve 10:1 to 20:1 compression without visible loss, bringing the effective storage requirement down to 1 to 2 bits/pixel. 30:1 to 50:1 compression is possible with small to moderate defects, while for very-low-quality purposes such as previews or archive indexes, 100:1 compression is quite feasible. An image compressed 100:1 with JPEG takes up the same space as a full-color one-tenth-scale thumbnail image, yet it retains much more detail than such a thumbnail. For comparison, a GIF version of the same image would start out by sacrificing most of the color information to reduce the image to 256 colors (8 bits/pixel). This provides 3:1 compression. GIF has additional "LZW" compression built in, but LZW doesn't work very well on typical photographic data; at most you may get 5:1 compression overall, and it's not at all uncommon for LZW to be a net loss (i.e., less than 3:1 overall compression). LZW *does* work well on simpler images such as line drawings, which is why GIF handles that sort of image so well. When a JPEG file is made from full-color photographic data, using a quality setting just high enough to prevent visible loss, the JPEG will typically be a factor of four or five smaller than a GIF file made from the same data. Gray-scale images do not compress by such large factors. Because the human eye is much more sensitive to brightness variations than to hue variations, JPEG can compress hue data more heavily than brightness (gray-scale) data. A gray-scale JPEG file is generally only about 10%-25% smaller than a full-color JPEG file of similar visual quality. But the uncompressed gray-scale data is only 8 bits/pixel, or one-third the size of the color data, so the calculated compression ratio is much lower. The threshold of visible loss is often around 5:1 compression for gray-scale images. The exact threshold at which errors become visible depends on your viewing conditions. The smaller an individual pixel, the harder it is to see an error; so errors are more visible on a computer screen (at maybe 70 dots/inch) than on a high-quality color printout (300 or more dots/inch). Thus a higher-resolution image can tolerate more compression ... which is fortunate considering it's much bigger to start with. The numbers quoted above are typical for screen viewing. Also note that the threshold of visible error varies considerably across images. ------------------------------ Subject: [5] What are good "quality" settings for JPEG? Most JPEG compressors let you pick a file size vs. image quality tradeoff by selecting a quality setting. There seems to be widespread confusion about the meaning of these settings. "Quality 95" does NOT mean "keep 95% of the information", as some have claimed. The quality scale is purely arbitrary; it's not a percentage of anything. In fact, quality scales aren't even standardized across JPEG programs. The quality settings discussed in this article apply to the free IJG JPEG software (described in part 2), and to many programs based on it. Other JPEG implementations, notably Apple's and HSI's, use completely different quality scales; for instance, Apple's scale runs from 0-4, not 0-100. Some programs don't even provide a numeric scale, just "high"/"medium"/"low" style choices. (Fortunately, this doesn't prevent different implementations from exchanging compressed files.) In most cases the user's goal is to pick the lowest quality setting, or smallest file size, that decompresses into an image indistinguishable from the original. This setting will vary from one image to another and from one observer to another, but here are some rules of thumb. For good-quality, full-color source images, the default IJG quality setting (Q 75) is very often the best choice. This setting is about the lowest you can go without expecting to see defects in a typical image. Try Q 75 first; if you see defects, then go up. If the image was less than perfect quality to begin with, you might be able to drop down to Q 50 without objectionable degradation. On the other hand, you might need to go to a *higher* quality setting to avoid further loss. This is often necessary if the image contains dithering or moire patterns (see "[9] What are some rules of thumb for converting GIF images to JPEG?"). Except for experimental purposes, never go above about Q 95; using Q 100 will produce a file two or three times as large as Q 95, but of hardly any better quality. If you see a file made with Q 100, it's a pretty sure sign that the maker didn't know what he/she was doing. If you want a very small file (say for preview or indexing purposes) and are prepared to tolerate large defects, a Q setting in the range of 5 to 10 is about right. Q 2 or so may be amusing as "op art". (It's worth mentioning that the current IJG software is not optimized for such low quality factors. Future versions may achieve better image quality for the same file size at low quality settings.) ------------------------------ Subject: [6] Where can I get JPEG software? See part 2 of this FAQ for recommendations about programs for particular systems. Part 2 also tells where to find free C source code for implementing JPEG, in case you want to write your own programs using JPEG. The comp.graphics FAQs and the alt.binaries.pictures FAQ are more general sources of information about graphics programs available on the Internet (see "[19] Where are FAQ lists archived?"). ------------------------------ Subject: [7] How do I view JPEG images posted on Usenet? Image files posted on the alt.binaries.pictures.* newsgroups are usually "uuencoded". Uuencoding converts binary image data into text that can safely be posted. Most posters also divide large posts into multiple parts, since some news software can't cope with big articles. Before your viewer will recognize the image, you must combine the parts into one file and run the text through a uudecode program. (This is all true for GIF as well as JPEG, by the way.) There are programs available to automate this process. For more info see the alt.binaries.pictures FAQ, which is available from rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/pictures-faq/part[1-3], or on WWW at http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/pictures-faq/top.html (see also "[19] Where are FAQ lists archived?"). ------------------------------ Subject: [8] What is color quantization? Most people don't have full-color (24 bit per pixel) display hardware. Typical display hardware stores 8 or fewer bits per pixel, so it can display 256 or fewer distinct colors at a time. To display a full-color image, the computer must choose an appropriate set of representative colors and map the image into these colors. This process is called "color quantization". (This is something of a misnomer; "color selection" or "color reduction" would be a better term. But we're stuck with the standard usage.) Clearly, color quantization is a lossy process. It turns out that for most images, the details of the color quantization algorithm have *much* more impact on the final image quality than do any errors introduced by JPEG itself (except at the very lowest JPEG quality settings). Making a good color quantization method is a black art, and no single algorithm is best for all images. Since JPEG is a full-color format, displaying a color JPEG image on 8-bit-or-less hardware requires color quantization. The speed and image quality of a JPEG viewer running on such hardware are largely determined by its quantization algorithm. Depending on whether a quick-and-dirty or good-but-slow method is used, you'll see great variation in image quality among viewers on 8-bit displays, much more than occurs on 24-bit displays. On the other hand, a GIF image has already been quantized to 256 or fewer colors. (A GIF always has a specific number of colors in its palette, and the format doesn't allow more than 256 palette entries.) GIF has the advantage that the image maker precomputes the color quantization, so viewers don't have to; this is one of the things that make GIF viewers faster than JPEG viewers. But this is also the *disadvantage* of GIF: you're stuck with the image maker's quantization. If the maker quantized to a different number of colors than what you can display, you'll either waste display capability or else have to requantize to reduce the number of colors (which usually results in much poorer image quality than quantizing once from a full-color image). Furthermore, if the maker didn't use a high-quality color quantization algorithm, you're out of luck --- the image is ruined. For this reason, JPEG promises significantly better image quality than GIF for all users whose machines don't match the image maker's display hardware. JPEG's full color image can be quantized to precisely match the viewer's display hardware. Furthermore, you will be able to take advantage of future improvements in quantization algorithms, or purchase better display hardware, to get a better view of JPEG images you already have. With a GIF, you're stuck forevermore with what was sent. A growing number of people have better-than-8-bit display hardware already: 15-bit "hi-color" PC displays, true 24-bit displays on workstations and Macintoshes, etc. For these people, GIF is already obsolete, as it cannot represent an image to the full capabilities of their display. JPEG images can drive these displays much more effectively. In short, JPEG is an all-around better choice than GIF for representing photographic images in a machine-independent fashion. It's sometimes thought that a JPEG converted from a GIF shouldn't require color quantization. This is false: even when you feed a 256-or-less-color GIF into JPEG, what comes out of the decompressor is not 256 colors, but thousands of colors. This happens because JPEG's lossiness affects each pixel a little differently, so two pixels that started with identical colors will usually come out with slightly different colors. Considering the whole image, each original color gets "smeared" into a group of nearby colors. Therefore quantization is always required to display a color JPEG on a colormapped display, regardless of the image source. The same effect makes it nearly meaningless to talk about the number of colors used by a JPEG image. Even if you tried to count the number of distinct pixel values, different JPEG decoders would give you different results because of roundoff error differences. I occasionally see posted images described as "256-color JPEG". This tells me that the poster (a) hasn't read this FAQ and (b) probably converted the JPEG from a GIF. JPEGs can be classified as color or gray-scale, but number of colors just isn't a useful concept for JPEG, any more than it is for a real photograph. ------------------------------ Subject: [9] What are some rules of thumb for converting GIF images to JPEG? Converting GIF files to JPEG is a tricky business --- you are piling one set of limitations atop a quite different set, and the results can be awful. Certainly a JPEG made from a GIF will never be as good as a JPEG made from true 24-bit color data. But if what you've got is GIFs, and you need to save space, here are some hints for getting the best results. With care and a clean source image, it's often possible to make a JPEG of quality equivalent to the GIF. This does not mean that the JPEG looks pixel-for-pixel identical to the GIF --- it won't. Especially not on an 8-bit display, because the color quantization process used to display the JPEG probably won't quite match the quantization process used to make the GIF from the original data (see "[8] What is color quantization?"). But remember that the GIF itself is not all that faithful to the full-color original, if you look at individual pixels. Looking at the overall image, a converted JPEG can look as good as its GIF source. Some people claim that on 24-bit displays, a carefully converted JPEG can actually look better than the GIF source, because dither patterns have been eliminated. (More about dithering in a moment.) On the other hand, JPEG conversion absolutely *will* degrade an unsuitable image or one that is converted carelessly. If you are not willing to take the amount of trouble suggested below, you're much better off leaving your GIF images alone. Simply cranking the JPEG quality setting up to a very high value wastes space (which defeats the whole point of the exercise, no?) and some images will be degraded anyway. The first rule is never to convert an image that's not appropriate for JPEG (see "[3] When should I use JPEG, and when should I stick with GIF?"). Large, high-visual-quality photographic images are usually the best source material. And they take up lots of space in GIF form, so they offer significant potential space savings. (A good rule of thumb is not to bother converting any GIF that's much under 100 Kbytes; the potential savings isn't worth the hassle.) The second rule is to look at each JPEG, to make sure you are happy with it, before throwing away the corresponding GIF. This will give you a chance to re-do the conversion with a higher quality setting if necessary. Also compare the file sizes --- if the image isn't suitable JPEG material, a JPEG file of reasonable quality may come out *larger* than the GIF. The third rule is to get rid of the border. Many people have developed an odd habit of putting a large single-color border around a GIF image. While useless, this is nearly free in terms of storage cost in GIF files. It is NOT free in JPEG files, either in storage space or in decoding time; and the sharp border boundary can create visible artifacts ("ghost" edges). Furthermore, when viewing a bordered JPEG on an 8-bit display, the quantizer will think the border color is important because there's so much of it, and hence will waste color palette entries on the border, thus actually reducing the displayed quality of the main part of the image! So do yourself a favor and crop off any border before JPEGing. The fourth rule is to know where the image came from. Repeated GIF<=>JPEG conversions are guaranteed to turn an image into mush, because you pay a quality-loss price on each round trip. Don't reconvert images that have been converted before. Gray-scale images usually convert without much problem. When using cjpeg, be sure to use the -gray switch. (Otherwise, cjpeg treats a GIF as color data; this works, but it wastes space and time if the image is really only gray-scale.) Quality settings around the default (75) are usually fine. Color images are much trickier. Color GIFs of photographic images are usually "dithered" to fool your eye into seeing more than the 256 colors that GIF can actually store. If you enlarge the image, you will find that adjacent pixels are often of significantly different colors; at normal size the eye averages these pixels together to produce the illusion of an intermediate color value. The trouble with dithering is that, to JPEG, it looks like high-spatial-frequency color noise; and JPEG can't compress noise very well. The resulting JPEG file is both larger and of lower image quality than what you would have gotten from JPEGing the original full color image (if you had it). To get around this, you need to "smooth" the GIF image before compression. Smoothing averages together nearby pixels, thus approximating the color that you thought you saw anyway, and in the process getting rid of the rapid color changes that give JPEG trouble. Proper use of smoothing will both reduce the size of the compressed file and give you a better-looking output image than you'd get without smoothing. With the IJG JPEG software (cjpeg or derived programs), a simple smoothing capability is built in. Try "-smooth 10" or so when converting GIFs. Values of 10 to 25 seem to work well for high-quality GIFs. GIFs with heavy-handed dithering may require larger smoothing factors. (If you can see regular fine-scale patterns on the GIF image even without enlargement, then strong smoothing is definitely called for.) Too large a smoothing factor will blur the output image, which you don't want. If you are an image processing wizard, you can also do smoothing with a separate filtering program, but appropriate use of such tools is beyond the scope of this FAQ. Quality settings around 85 (a bit higher than default) usually work well when converting color GIFs, assuming that you've picked a good smoothing factor. You may need still higher quality settings if you can't hide the dithering pattern with a reasonable smoothing factor. Really badly dithered GIFs are best left as GIFs. Don't expect JPEG files converted from GIFs to be as small as those created directly from full-color originals. The dithering noise wastes space, but you won't be able to smooth away all the noise without blurring the image. Typically, a good-quality converted JPEG will be one-half to one-third the size of the GIF file, not one-fourth as suggested in section 4. If the JPEG comes out much more than half the size of the GIF, this is a good sign that the image shouldn't be converted at all. The upshot of all this is that "cjpeg -quality 85 -smooth 10" is probably a good starting point for converting color GIFs. But if you care about the image, you'll want to check the results and maybe try a few other settings. Blindly converting a large GIF library at this or any other setting is a recipe for disaster. ------------------------------ Subject: [10] Does loss accumulate with repeated compression/decompression? It would be nice if, having compressed an image with JPEG, you could decompress it, manipulate it (crop off a border, say), and recompress it without any further image degradation beyond what you lost initially. Unfortunately THIS IS NOT THE CASE. In general, recompressing an altered image loses more information. Hence it's important to minimize the number of generations of JPEG compression between initial and final versions of an image. It turns out that if you decompress and recompress an image at the same quality setting first used, little or no further degradation occurs. This means that you can make local modifications to a JPEG image without material degradation of other areas of the image. The areas you change will degrade, however. Counterintuitively, this works better the lower the quality setting. But you must use *exactly* the same setting, or all bets are off. Also, the decompressed image must be saved in a full-color format; if you do JPEG=>GIF=>JPEG, the color quantization step loses lots of information. Unfortunately, cropping doesn't count as a local change! JPEG processes the image in small blocks, and cropping usually moves the block boundaries, so that the image looks completely different to JPEG. You can take advantage of the low-degradation behavior if you are careful to crop the top and left margins only by a multiple of the block size (typically 16 pixels), so that the remaining blocks start in the same places. The bottom line is that JPEG is a useful format for archival storage and transmission of images, but you don't want to use it as an intermediate format for sequences of image manipulation steps. Use a lossless 24-bit format (PPM, RLE, TIFF, etc) while working on the image, then JPEG it when you are ready to file it away. Aside from avoiding degradation, you will save a lot of compression/decompression time this way :-). ------------------------------ Subject: [11] What is progressive JPEG? A simple or "baseline" JPEG file is stored as one top-to-bottom scan of the image. Progressive JPEG allows the image to be stored as a series of scans of increasing quality. The first scan shows the image at the equivalent of a very low quality setting, and therefore it takes very little space. Successive scans improve the quality. Each scan adds to the data already provided, so that the total storage requirement is about the same as for a baseline JPEG image of the same quality as the final scan. (Basically, progressive JPEG is just a rearrangement of the same data into a more complicated order.) The advantage of progressive JPEG is that if an image is being viewed on-the-fly as it is transmitted, the viewer sees an approximation to the whole image very quickly, with gradual improvement of quality as one waits longer; this is much nicer than a slow top-to-bottom display of the image. The disadvantage is that each scan takes about the same amount of computation to display as a whole baseline JPEG file would. So progressive JPEG only makes sense if one has a decoder that's much faster than the communication link. Up until recently, there weren't many applications in which progressive JPEG looked attractive, so hardly any implementations of it are available. But with the popularity of WWW browsers running over rather slow modem links, and with the ever-increasing horsepower of personal computers, progressive JPEG is starting to look like a win for WWW. I expect that progressive JPEG capability will start to appear in WWW browsers during 1995. ------------------------------ Subject: [12] Isn't there a lossless JPEG? There's a great deal of confusion on this subject. The JPEG standard does include a truly lossless compression algorithm, i.e., one that guarantees its decompressed output is bit-for-bit identical to the original input. However, this lossless mode has almost nothing in common with the regular lossy JPEG algorithm, and it offers much less compression. Lossless JPEG typically compresses full-color data by around 2:1. Lossless JPEG works well only on continuous-tone images; it does not provide useful compression of palette-color images or low-bit-depth images. (The JBIG standard is considered superior to lossless JPEG for images of less than about 6 bits/sample.) At present, very few implementations of lossless JPEG exist. The PVRG code mentioned in part 2 handles lossless JPEG. Another free implementation is available from ftp.cs.cornell.edu:/pub/multimed/ljpg.tar.Z; this is a smaller program that handles *only* lossless JPEG. Cranking a regular JPEG implementation up to its maximum quality setting *does not* get you lossless storage; lossless JPEG is a fundamentally different method. Even at the maximum possible quality setting, regular JPEG cannot be lossless because it is subject to roundoff errors in various calculations. The roundoff errors are nearly always too small to be seen, but they will accumulate if you put the image through multiple cycles of compression. Many implementations won't even let you get to the maximum possible setting, because it's such an inefficient way to use regular JPEG. With the IJG JPEG software, for example, you have to say not only "-quality 100" but also "-sample 1x1" to eliminate all deliberate loss of information. The resulting files are far larger and of only fractionally better quality than files generated at more reasonable settings. And they're still slightly lossy! If you really need lossless storage, don't try to approximate it with regular JPEG. ------------------------------ Subject: [13] Why all the argument about file formats? Strictly speaking, JPEG refers only to a family of compression algorithms; it does *not* refer to a specific image file format. The JPEG committee was prevented from defining a file format by turf wars within the international standards organizations. Since we can't actually exchange images with anyone else unless we agree on a common file format, this leaves us with a problem. In the absence of official standards, a number of JPEG program writers have just gone off to "do their own thing", and as a result their programs aren't compatible with anyone else's. The closest thing we have to a standard JPEG format is some work that's been coordinated by people at C-Cube Microsystems. They have defined two JPEG-based file formats: * JFIF (JPEG File Interchange Format), a "low-end" format that transports pixels and not much else. * TIFF/JPEG, aka TIFF 6.0, an extension of the Aldus TIFF format. TIFF is a "high-end" format that will let you record just about everything you ever wanted to know about an image, and a lot more besides :-). TIFF is far more complex than JFIF, and is generally less transportable, because different vendors have often implemented slightly different and incompatible subsets of TIFF. It's not likely that adding JPEG to the mix will do anything to improve this situation. Both of these formats were developed with input from all the major vendors of JPEG-related products; it's reasonably likely that future commercial products will adhere to one or both standards. JFIF has emerged as the de-facto standard on Usenet. JFIF is simpler than TIFF and is available now; the TIFF 6.0 spec for incorporating JPEG is not widely implemented, partly because it has some serious design flaws. It is likely that the TIFF 6.0 JPEG section will be changed significantly before widespread adoption occurs. Even when TIFF/JPEG is well defined, the JFIF format is likely to be a widely supported "lowest common denominator"; TIFF/JPEG files may never be as transportable as JFIF. A particular case of wide interest is Apple's Macintosh QuickTime software. QuickTime uses a JFIF-compatible format wrapped inside the Mac-specific PICT structure. Conversion between JFIF and PICT/JPEG is pretty straightforward, and several Mac programs are available to do it (see Mac portion of part 2). If you have an editor that handles binary files, you can even strip a PICT/JPEG file down to JFIF by hand; see the next section for details. Another particular case is Handmade Software's DOS programs (GIF2JPG/JPG2GIF and Image Alchemy). These programs are capable of reading and writing JFIF format. By default, though, they write a proprietary format developed by HSI. This format is NOT readable by any non-HSI programs and should not be used for Usenet postings. Use the -j switch to get JFIF output. (This applies to old versions of these programs; the current releases emit JFIF format by default. You still should be careful not to post HSI-format files, unless you want to get flamed by people on non-PC platforms.) News flash: the ISO JPEG committee seems to have won their turf wars. They will define a complete file format spec called "SPIFF" in the next version of the JPEG standard. It's pretty late in the game though, so whether this will have much impact on real-world files remains to be seen. ------------------------------ Subject: [14] How do I recognize which file format I have, and what do I do about it? If you have an alleged JPEG file that your software won't read, it's likely to be HSI format or some other proprietary JPEG-based format. You can tell what you have by inspecting the first few bytes of the file: 1. A JFIF-standard file will start with the four bytes (hex) FF D8 FF E0, followed by two variable bytes (often hex 00 10), followed by 'JFIF'. 2. If you see FF D8 at the start, but not the 'JFIF' marker, you may have a "raw JPEG" file. This is probably decodable as-is by JFIF software --- it's worth a try, anyway. 3. HSI files start with 'hsi1'. You're out of luck unless you have HSI software. Portions of the file may look like plain JPEG data, but they usually won't decompress properly with non-HSI programs. 4. A Macintosh PICT file, if JPEG-compressed, will have several hundred bytes of header (often 726 bytes, but not always) followed by JPEG data. Look for the 3-byte sequence (hex) FF D8 FF. The text 'Photo - JPEG' will usually appear shortly before this header, and 'AppleMark' or 'JFIF' will usually appear shortly after it. Strip off everything before the FF D8 FF and you will usually be able to decode the file. (This will fail if the PICT image is divided into multiple "bands", but that is uncommon.) 5. If the file came from a Macintosh, it could also be a standard JFIF file with a MacBinary header attached. In this case, the JFIF header will appear 512 bytes into the file. Get rid of the first 512 bytes and you're set. 6. Anything else: it's a proprietary format, or not JPEG at all. If you are lucky, the file may consist of a header and a raw JPEG data stream. If you can identify the start of the JPEG data stream (look for FF D8), try stripping off everything before that. HSI files used to be rather common in alt.binaries.pictures.* postings, although thankfully they have gotten less so. You can spot an HSI posting by looking at the first few characters of the uuencoded data. The characteristic HSI pattern is "begin" line M:'-I ... whereas standard JFIF files begin with "begin" line M_]C_X ... If you learn to spot the HSI pattern, you can save yourself the trouble of downloading unusable files. ------------------------------ Subject: [15] How does JPEG work? You can find an introduction and references for further reading in the comp.compression FAQ, which is available from the news.answers archive at rtfm.mit.edu, in files /pub/usenet/news.answers/compression-faq/part[1-3] (see also "[19] Where are FAQ lists archived?"). The comp.compression FAQ is also a good starting point for information on other state-of-the-art image compression methods, such as wavelets and fractals. A quick comparison: wavelets are likely to be the basis of the next generation of image-compression standards, but they are perhaps 10 years behind JPEG in the standardization pipeline. Fractals have been terribly over-hyped by their chief commercial proponent, and it's difficult to say what their true capabilities are. ------------------------------ Subject: [16] What about arithmetic coding? The JPEG spec defines two different "back end" modules for the final output of compressed data: either Huffman coding or arithmetic coding is allowed. The choice has no impact on image quality, but arithmetic coding usually produces a smaller compressed file. On typical images, arithmetic coding produces a file 5 to 10 percent smaller than Huffman coding. (All the file-size numbers previously cited are for Huffman coding.) Unfortunately, the particular variant of arithmetic coding specified by the JPEG standard is subject to patents owned by IBM, AT&T, and Mitsubishi. Thus *you cannot legally use JPEG arithmetic coding* unless you obtain licenses from these companies. (Patent law's "experimental use" exception allows people to test a patented method in the context of scientific research, but any commercial or routine personal use is infringement.) I recommend that people not use JPEG arithmetic coding; the space savings isn't great enough to justify the potential legal hassles. In particular, arithmetic coding *should not* be used for any images to be exchanged on Usenet. Even if you don't care about US patent law, other folks do. ------------------------------ Subject: [17] Could an FPU speed up JPEG? How about a DSP chip? Since JPEG is so compute-intensive, many people suggest that using an FPU chip (a math coprocessor) should speed it up. This is not so. Most production-quality JPEG programs use only integer arithmetic and so they are unaffected by the presence or absence of floating-point hardware. It is possible to save a few operations by doing the DCT step in floating point. On most PC-class machines, FP math is enough slower than integer math that the overall speed is still much worse with FP. Some high-priced workstations and supercomputers have fast enough FP hardware to make an FP DCT method be a win. DSP (digital signal processing) chips are ideally suited for fast repetitive integer arithmetic, so programming a DSP to do JPEG can yield significant speedups. DSPs are starting to be found as add-ons for PCs and small workstations, so you can expect to see DSP-based JPEG programs popping up. ------------------------------ Subject: [18] Isn't there an M-JPEG standard for motion pictures? As was stated in section 1, JPEG is only for still images. Nonetheless, you will frequently see references to "motion JPEG" or "M-JPEG" for video. *There is no such standard*. Various vendors have applied JPEG to individual frames of a video sequence, and have called the result "M-JPEG". Unfortunately, in the absence of any recognized standard, they've each done it differently. The resulting files are usually not compatible across different vendors. MPEG is the recognized standard for motion picture compression. It uses many of the same techniques as JPEG, but adds inter-frame compression to exploit the similarities that usually exist between successive frames. Because of this, MPEG typically compresses a video sequence by about a factor of three more than "M-JPEG" methods can. The disadvantages of MPEG are (1) it requires much more computation to generate the compressed sequence (since detecting visual similarities is hard for a computer), and (2) it's difficult to edit an MPEG sequence on a frame-by-frame basis (since each frame is intimately tied to the ones around it). This latter problem has made "M-JPEG" methods rather popular for video editing products. It's a shame that there isn't a recognized M-JPEG standard. But there isn't, so if you buy a product identified as "M-JPEG", be aware that you are probably locking yourself into that one vendor. See the MPEG FAQ for more information about MPEG. ------------------------------ Subject: [19] Where are FAQ lists archived? Many FAQs are crossposted to news.answers. Well-run netnews sites will have the latest versions available in that newsgroup. However, there are a *lot* of postings in news.answers, and they can be hard to sort through. The latest versions of news.answers postings are archived at rtfm.mit.edu. You can retrieve this FAQ by FTP as /pub/usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part1 and /pub/usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part2. If you have no FTP access, send e-mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu containing the lines send usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part1 send usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part2 (If you don't get a reply, the server may be misreading your return address; add a line such as "path myname@mysite" to specify your correct e-mail address to reply to.) For more info about the FAQ archive, retrieve the file rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/news-answers/introduction. The same FAQs are also available in the World Wide Web; see the index at http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/FAQ-List.html. This FAQ is http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/jpeg-faq/top.html. -- tom lane organizer, Independent JPEG Group tgl@netcom.com or tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us Archive-name: jpeg-faq/part2 Posting-Frequency: every 14 days Last-modified: 5 March 1995 This article answers Frequently Asked Questions about JPEG image compression. This is part 2, covering system-specific hints and program recommendations for a variety of computer systems. Part 1 covers general questions and answers about JPEG. As always, suggestions for improvement of this FAQ are welcome. New since version of 3 February 1995: * New entry for FastView (Amiga JPEG/GIF/ILBM viewer). * New versions of ACDSee (1.21), 2SHOW (1.06), PMView (0.90), GraphicConverter (2.07). * Updated FTP locations for OS/2 programs. This article includes the following sections: General info: [1] What is covered in this FAQ? [2] How do I retrieve these programs? Programs and hints for specific systems: [3] X Windows [4] Unix (without X) [5] MS-DOS [6] Microsoft Windows [7] OS/2 [8] Macintosh [9] Amiga [10] Atari ST [11] Acorn Archimedes [12] NeXT [13] Other systems Source code for JPEG: [14] Freely available source code for JPEG Miscellaneous: [15] Where are FAQ lists archived? This article and its companion are posted every 2 weeks. If you can't find part 1, you can get it from the news.answers archive at rtfm.mit.edu (see "[15] Where are FAQ lists archived?"). This article changes frequently; get a new copy if the one you are reading is more than a couple months old. ------------------------------ Subject: [1] What is covered in this FAQ? This list describes programs that are of particular interest to JPEG users. For the most part, I concentrate on viewers, since a viewer program is the first thing you'll need. Some general image-editing programs are listed too, especially if they are useful as plain viewers (meaning that they can load and display an image as quickly and easily as a dedicated viewer). Programs that convert JPEG to and from other image file formats are also covered. I list only freeware and shareware programs that are available on the Internet by FTP. Commercial products are intentionally excluded, to keep the list to a reasonable size and to avoid any appearance of advertising. Also, I try to list only programs that are popular among Usenet users, as indicated by comments and recommendations in news articles. I have no access to many of the types of systems covered here, so I have to rely on what other people say about a program to decide whether to list it. If you have an opinion pro or con on any program, I'd appreciate hearing it. This FAQ also includes a few hints that are specific to a machine or program, and thus don't belong in the general discussion of part 1. ------------------------------ Subject: [2] How do I retrieve these programs? All the files mentioned in this FAQ are available by standard Internet FTP. If you don't know how to use FTP, please read the article "Anonymous FTP FAQ List", which you can get by sending e-mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with the single line "send usenet/news.answers/ftp-list/faq" in the body. (See also "[15] Where are FAQ lists archived?") This section gives some quick reminders which are not meant as a substitute for reading the FTP FAQ. If you do not have direct access to FTP, you can use an "ftpmail" server to obtain files by e-mail. See the FTP FAQ for details. If you use a WWW browser such as Mosaic or Lynx, it will do FTP for you. To retrieve a file described here as "site.name:/path/to/file", tell the browser to open the URL "ftp://site.name/path/to/file". (If you are reading this FAQ in the WWW FAQ archive, the file names should appear as links that you can just click on.) Don't forget to set save-to-disk mode first. Many of the pointers given here refer to popular central archive sites, such as oak.oakland.edu for DOS software or sumex-aim.stanford.edu for Mac. These sites are often overloaded, and are likely to refuse your connection request when they are busy. You can try again at a less popular time of day, or you can look for a "mirror site". Most central archive sites have groups of mirror sites that keep copies of their files. Find out the name of the mirror site closest to you, and visit that site instead; it's good net citizenship and you'll get faster response. Check the FAQs for the newsgroups specific to your system type to find lists of mirror sites. (The archive site may list some mirror sites in its connection-refused error message. Unfortunately, some FTP programs won't show you the whole message. WWW browsers are often bad about this.) If you are able to reach the archive site, but the file you want doesn't exist, most likely it's been replaced by a newer version. Get a directory listing of the directory that's supposed to contain the file, and look for a file with a similar name but a higher version number. (If you find an out-of-date reference in a *current* version of the JPEG FAQ, I'd appreciate hearing about it by e-mail.) Practically all of the files listed here are compressed archive files. This means you need to retrieve them in binary mode. (WWW browsers do this automatically, but many older FTP programs must be told to use binary mode.) Once you've got the archive file, you'll need a decompressor/dearchiver to extract the program and documentation files inside it. Check the FAQs for your system type to find out where to get dearchiver programs. ------------------------------ Subject: [3] X Windows XV is an excellent viewer for JPEG, GIF, and many other image formats. It can also do format conversion and some simple image manipulations. Get it from ftp.cis.upenn.edu:/pub/xv/xv-3.10.tar.gz. Shareware, $25. Version 3.10 has some nifty new features, and it loads JPEGs noticeably faster than any prior version. If you're still using version 2.anything, it's definitely time to upgrade. HINT: if you have an 8-bit display then you need to "lock 8-bit mode" to get decent display of JPEG images. (But do NOT do this if you intend to resave the image, because it'll be written from the 8-bit version, thus costing you image quality.) You can set this mode to be default by adding "xv.force8: true" to your .Xdefaults file. Another excellent choice is John Cristy's free ImageMagick package, ftp.x.org:/contrib/applications/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-3.5.tar.gz. This package handles many image processing and conversion tasks. The ImageMagick viewer handles 24-bit displays correctly; for colormapped displays, it does better (though slower) color quantization than XV or the basic IJG JPEG software. Both of the above are large, complex packages. If you just want a simple image viewer, try xloadimage or xli. xloadimage views and converts many image file types including JPEG. Version 4.1 has better JPEG support than prior versions and is easier to install. xloadimage is free and available from ftp.x.org:/R5contrib/xloadimage.4.1.tar.gz. xli is a variant version of xloadimage; xli is slightly better as an interactive viewer, but it can't be used as a converter, and it supports fewer file formats. xli is also free and available from ftp.x.org:/contrib/applications/xli.1.16.tar.gz. ------------------------------ Subject: [4] Unix (without X) If you want a command-line JPEG conversion program, see the IJG source code described in section 14. (This code is included as a subdirectory in most of the X programs described above, although they may not have the latest version.) Non-X viewers are hard to come by, since they are very hardware dependent. Linux users with VGA/SVGA displays may like zgv. Version 2.5 is available from sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/apps/graphics/viewers/zgv2.5-bin.tar.gz. (Several other alternatives are available in the same directory.) If you use a less popular platform, you're probably out of luck. ------------------------------ Subject: [5] MS-DOS This covers plain DOS; for Windows or OS/2 programs, see the next sections. NOTE ABOUT SIMTEL FILES: The largest Internet collection of PC-related programs is the Simtel archives (named for the original archive site, now defunct). The principal archive site for these files is oak.oakland.edu, which keeps Simtel files under /SimTel; so files in the msdos/graphics section of the archives are at oak.oakland.edu:/SimTel/msdos/graphics/. There are many mirror sites which keep copies of the Simtel files; for quickest response you should use the mirror site closest to you. Consult the periodic postings in comp.archives.msdos.announce to find your nearest mirror site. If you have no FTP capability, the same postings will tell you how to retrieve Simtel files by e-mail. QPEG is the fastest noncommercial JPEG viewer I know of. In exchange for speed, QPEG gives up some image quality, particularly on 256-or-less-color displays. Its best feature is a really-fast small preview window, which is great for searching through lots of image files. Also views GIF,TGA,BMP,PCX. Requires 386-or-better CPU and VGA-or-better display card. Current version is 1.5e, available from ftp.tu-clausthal.de:/pub/msdos/graphics/qpeg15e.zip. Also available from Simtel sites, file msdos/graphics/qpeg15e.zip. Shareware, $20. DVPEG is a free viewer for JPEG, GIF, Targa, and PPM files. Current version is 3.0l, available from sunee.uwaterloo.ca:/pub/jpeg/viewers/dvpeg30l.zip. (That's lower case l, not digit 1.) This is a good basic viewer that works on either 286 or 386/486 machines. The user interface is clunky but functional. DVPEG is substantially faster than it used to be; on hi-color displays it is nearly as fast as QPEG. On 8-bit displays, its two-pass quantization mode is slow but gives much better image quality than QPEG can provide. Lesser-used DOS viewers include: * DISPLAY, alias DISP. The Swiss army knife of DOS viewers. Does almost everything, but a bit intimidating for newcomers. User interface is much improved over early versions, but still awkward in places. Requires 386 or better. Freeware. Current version is 1.87, available from nctuccca.edu.tw:/PC/graphics/disp/disp187a.zip and disp187b.zip. * GDS. A well-done viewer and image converter for many image formats. Installation is simple, and the on-line documentation is very good. JPEG loading is a bit slower than the above viewers, though. Shareware, $40. Current version is 3.1f. A slightly restricted demo version is available from ftp.netcom.com:/pub/ph/photodex/gds31f.zip. * NVIEW. Views JPEG and half a dozen other image formats. Easy to use, very easy to install. Only moderately fast, but it has lots of options. Supports hi-color and true-color modes on some cards, but not mine :-(. Requires 386 or better. Current version is 1.40, available from Simtel sites, file msdos/graphics/nview140.zip. Shareware, $29. * ColorView for DOS. This viewer's main advantage is easy installation. Menu interface is spiffy-looking but I find it a bit clunky to use. Does not require 386, should work with any display that has a VESA driver. Current version is 2.1, available from Simtel sites, file msdos/graphics/dcview21.zip. Requires a VESA graphics driver; if you don't have one, look in msdos/graphics/vesadrv2.zip or msdos/graphics/vesa-tsr.zip. Shareware, $30. DISRECOMMENDATION: The well-known GIF viewer CompuShow (CSHOW, recently renamed 2SHOW) supports JPEG, but CSHOW's JPEG implementation is crummy: it's much slower than any of the above viewers, and its image quality is poor except on hi-color displays. Too bad ... it'd have been nice to see a good JPEG capability in CSHOW, especially since CSHOW supports pre-VGA displays while most of the above viewers don't. Available from Simtel sites, file msdos/gif/2show106.zip. Shareware, $25. Due to the remarkable variety of PC graphics hardware, any one of these viewers might not work on your particular machine. If you can't get *any* of them to work, you'll need to use one of the following conversion programs to convert JPEG to GIF, then view with your favorite GIF viewer. (If you have hi-color hardware, don't use GIF as the intermediate format; try to find a hi-color BMP- or TARGA-capable viewer instead.) The free IJG JPEG converters are available from Simtel sites, file msdos/graphics/jpg5a.zip (or jpg5a386.zip if you have a 386 or better CPU and extended memory). These programs will convert JPEG to and from GIF, BMP, Targa, and PPM formats; they are DOS compilations of the free source code described in section 14. Handmade Software offers free JPEG<=>GIF conversion tools, GIF2JPG/JPG2GIF. These are quite slow and are limited to conversion to and from GIF format; thus they can't produce 24-bit color output from a JPEG. The sole advantage of these tools is that they will read and write HSI's proprietary JPEG format as well as the Usenet-standard JFIF format. Since HSI-format files are rather widespread on BBSes, this is a useful capability. Version 2.0 of these tools is free (prior versions were shareware). Get it from Simtel sites, file msdos/graphics/gif2jpg2.zip. NOTE: do not use HSI format for files to be posted on Usenet, since it is not readable by any non-HSI software. Handmade Software also has a shareware image conversion and manipulation package, Image Alchemy. This will translate JPEG files (both JFIF and HSI formats) to and from many other image formats. It can also display images. A demo version of Image Alchemy version 1.77 is available from Simtel sites, file msdos/graphics/alch177.zip. JPGINDEX is a useful tool for making indexes of JPEG image collections. Available from Simtel sites, file msdos/graphics/jpgidx13.zip. ------------------------------ Subject: [6] Microsoft Windows LView Pro is a viewer/editor/converter for JPEG, GIF, BMP, and other formats. Version 1.A is available from Simtel sites (see NOTE in previous section), file win3/graphics/lviewp1a.zip. Requires 386 or better CPU. LView Pro offers a wide array of image editing functions and can load JPEGs in either fast/low-quality or slow/high-quality modes. Shareware payment ($30) is required only for business usage or to obtain versions optimized for Win32s/NT, 486 or Pentium CPUs. ACDSee is a very fast, very simple JPEG and GIF viewer. Good choice if you don't want a lot of options to worry about. Current version is 1.21, available from ftp.cica.indiana.edu:/pub/pc/win3/desktop/acdc121.zip. Shareware, $15. WinECJ is a fast, no-frills viewer with image quality noticeably worse than most other JPEG viewers. (You can purchase a version with better image quality for AUD$30.) Version 1.2 is free and available from Simtel sites, file win3/graphics/winecj12.zip. Requires Windows 3.1 and 256-or-more-colors mode. WinJPEG (shareware, $25) displays JPEG,GIF,Targa,TIFF,PCX, and BMP files; it can write all of these formats too, so it can be used as a converter. It has some other nifty features including screen capture, color-balance adjustment, and slideshow. The current version is 2.65, available from Simtel sites, file win3/graphics/winjp265.zip. (This is a 286-compatible version; if you register, you'll get the 386-and-up version, which is roughly twice as fast.) Some people prefer Paint Shop Pro. It's not very impressive as just a JPEG viewer (especially since image quality is not very good on 8-bit displays), but it has lots of image manipulation features. Current version is 2.00, available from ftp.cica.indiana.edu:/pub/pc/win3/desktop/pspro200.zip. Shareware, $69. QPEG and DVPEG (see section 5) work under Windows, but only in full-screen mode, not in a window. Also note that you can run the DOS conversion programs described earlier inside a Windows DOS window. ------------------------------ Subject: [7] OS/2 The most widely used OS/2 JPEG viewers are: JoeView 1.22b: free JPEG/GIF/BMP/PCX/TIFF viewer. Available from hobbes.nmsu.edu:/os2/graphics/jovw122b.zip. PMJPEG 1.63: OS/2 2.x port of WinJPEG, a popular viewer/converter for Windows (see description in previous section). Shareware, $20. Available from hobbes.nmsu.edu:/os2/graphics/pmjpg163.zip. PMView 0.90: JPEG/GIF/BMP/Targa/etc viewer. GIF viewing very fast, JPEG viewing roughly the same speed as the above two programs. Has image manipulation & slideshow functions. Shareware, $35. Available from hobbes.nmsu.edu:/os2/graphics/pmview90.zip. All of these viewers require Palette Manager for best display quality. Opinion seems to be about equally split as to which is the best, so try them all to see which one you like. Possibilities for file format conversion include: Image Archiver 1.03: image conversion/viewing with PM graphical interface. Strong on conversion functions, viewing is a bit weaker. Shareware, $15. hobbes.nmsu.edu:/os2/graphics/imgarc13.zip. hobbes.nmsu.edu:/os2/graphics/jpegv4.zip is a 32-bit version of the free IJG conversion programs, version 4. (Version 5 is stuck in the archive admin's input queue :-(.) hobbes.nmsu.edu:/os2/graphics/jpeg4_16.zip is a 16-bit version of same, suitable for OS/2 1.x. Note: the hobbes OS/2 collection is mirrored at ftp-os2.cdrom.com. ------------------------------ Subject: [8] Macintosh Most Mac JPEG programs rely on Apple's JPEG implementation, which is part of the QuickTime system extension; so you need to have QuickTime installed. To use QuickTime, you need a 68020 or better CPU and you need to be running System 6.0.7 or later. (If you're running System 6, you must also install the 32-bit QuickDraw extension; in System 7, that is built in.) The latest freely available version of QuickTime is 1.6.1, available from ftp.apple.com:/dts/mac/sys.soft/quicktime/quicktime-1-6-1.hqx. Mac users should keep in mind that QuickTime's JPEG format, PICT/JPEG, is not the same as the Usenet-standard JFIF JPEG format. (See part 1 for details.) If you post images on Usenet, make sure they are in JFIF format. Most of the programs mentioned here can handle either format. The two major Internet sites for Mac software are sumex-aim.stanford.edu and mac.archive.umich.edu. Unfortunately they are both very busy, so you may have better luck getting files from a mirror site. See "Introductory Macintosh Frequently Asked Questions" in the comp.sys.mac.* newsgroups for the current locations of mirrors. JPEGView is an excellent free program for viewing JFIF,PICT/JPEG,GIF,TIFF, and other image files. It can convert between the two JPEG formats and can create preview images for files. The current version is 3.3.1, available from sumex-aim.stanford.edu:/info-mac/grf/util/jpeg-view-331.hqx. Requires System 7; QuickTime is optional. JPEGView usually produces the best color image quality of all the currently available Mac JPEG viewers, and it needs much less memory to view large images than most other Mac viewers. Given a large image, JPEGView automatically scales it down to fit on the screen, rather than presenting scroll bars like most other viewers. (You can zoom in on any desired portion, though.) Some people like this behavior, some don't. Overall, JPEGView's user interface is very well thought out. GIFConverter, a shareware ($40) image viewer/editor/converter, supports JFIF,PICT/JPEG,GIF, and many other image formats. Current version is 2.3.7, mac.archive.umich.edu:/mac/graphics/graphicsutil/gifconverter2.37.cpt.hqx. Requires System 6.0.5 or later. GIFConverter is not better than JPEGView as a plain JPEG/GIF viewer, but it has much more extensive image manipulation and format conversion capabilities. Also, GIFConverter can load and save JFIF images *without* QuickTime, so it is your best bet if your machine is too old to run QuickTime. (But it's faster with QuickTime.) Hint: if GIFConverter runs out of memory while loading a large JPEG, try converting the file to GIF with JPEG Convert, then viewing the GIF version. A competitor to GIFConverter is GraphicConverter, also shareware ($35). Current version is 2.07, available at sumex-aim.stanford.edu:/info-mac/grf/util/graphic-converter-207.hqx. Requires System 7 and QuickTime to handle JPEG. GraphicConverter has even more functionality than GIFConverter, but is correspondingly larger. Worth checking out if you want to manipulate images, not just look at them. JPEG Convert, a Mac version of the free IJG JPEG conversion utilities, is available at sumex-aim.stanford.edu:/info-mac/app/jpeg-convert-10.hqx. This will run on any Mac, but it only does file conversion, not viewing. You can use it in conjunction with any GIF viewer. Storm Technology's Picture Decompress is a free JPEG viewer/converter. This rather old program is inferior to the above programs in many ways, but it will run without System 7 or QuickTime, so you may be forced to use it on older systems. (It needs 32-bit QuickDraw, so really old machines can't use it.) File sumex-aim.stanford.edu:/info-mac/app/picture-decompress-201.hqx. If your Mac is too old to run 32-bit QuickDraw (a Mac Plus for instance), GIFConverter is your only choice for single-program JPEG viewing. If you don't want to pay for GIFConverter, use JPEG Convert and a free GIF viewer. More and more commercial Mac applications are supporting JPEG, although not all can deal with the Usenet-standard JFIF format. Adobe Photoshop, version 2.0.1 or later, can read and write JFIF-format JPEG files. (In 2.0.1, use the JPEG plug-in on the Acquire menu; 2.5 and later handle JPEG the same as other file types.) You must set the file type code of a downloaded JPEG file to 'JPEG' to allow Photoshop to recognize it. HINT: if you use Fetch to retrieve files by FTP, add ".jpg" to its list of binary file types under Customize/Suffix Mapping. Otherwise Fetch's "automatic" retrieval mode will retrieve JPEGs in text mode, thus corrupting the data. ------------------------------ Subject: [9] Amiga Most programs listed in this section are available from "AmiNet" archive sites. The master AmiNet site is wuarchive.wustl.edu, but there are many mirror sites and you should try to use the closest one. Osma Ahvenlampi posted a good review of Amiga picture viewers in comp.sys.amiga.reviews in March 1994. You can retrieve it from math.uh.edu:/pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews/software/graphics/PictureViewerSurvey_2. Opinions here are mostly stolen from his article. FastView is a fast, high-quality JPEG/GIF/ILBM viewer. It's new but has achieved a good reputation in a short time. Works well on both ECS and AGA displays. Shareware, $15; requires OS 2.0. Version 1.30 is available from Aminet sites, file /pub/aminet/gfx/show/FView130.lha. FastJPEG is a free JPEG viewer; it's fast and has good image quality, but it doesn't view any formats except JPEG. Somewhat faster than FastView on ECS machines, slower on AGA. Version 1.10 is available from Aminet sites, file /pub/aminet/gfx/show/FastJPEG_1.10.lha. PPShow is a good free JPEG/GIF/ILBM/ANIM/Datatype viewer. Version 4.0 is available from Aminet sites, file /pub/aminet/gfx/show/PPShow40.lha. For viewing JPEGs it is a little slower than FastJPEG, and image quality is not as good (particularly on ECS machines); but if you want to use just one viewer, PPShow is the one. HamLab Plus is an excellent JPEG viewer/converter, as well as being a general image manipulation tool. It's cheap (shareware, $20) and can read several formats besides JPEG. The current version is 2.0.8. A demo version is available from AmiNet sites, file /pub/aminet/gfx/edit/hamlab208d.lha. The demo version will crop images larger than 512x512, but it is otherwise fully functional. Rend24 (shareware, $30) is an image renderer that can display JPEG, ILBM, and GIF images. The program can be used to create animations, even capturing frames on-the-fly from rendering packages like Lightwave. The current version is 1.05, available from AmiNet sites, file /pub/aminet/gfx/aga/rend105.lha. Viewtek is a free JPEG/ILBM/GIF/ANIM viewer. The current version is 2.1, available from AmiNet sites, file /pub/aminet/gfx/show/ViewTEK21.lha. Viewtek used to be the best free JPEG viewer for Amiga, but it now faces stiff competition from FastJPEG and PPShow. The choice depends on your display hardware and personal preferences. In particular, Viewtek has poor display quality on ECS machines. There is finally a good JPEG datatype for use with datatype-based viewers (such as Multiview or ShowDT). Available from AmiNet sites, file /pub/aminet/util/wb/jfif_dtc.lha. The free IJG JPEG software is available compiled for Amigas from AmiNet sites, file /pub/aminet/gfx/conv/jpegV5Abin.lha. These programs convert JPEG to/from PPM, GIF, BMP, Targa formats. If you have a DCTV box or a compatible display, try JPEGonDCTV. Available from AmiNet sites, file /pub/aminet/gfx/show/JPEGonDCTV100.lha. Viewtek is also reported to work well with DCTV. ------------------------------ Subject: [10] Atari ST GEM-View (shareware, $26) displays JPEG, GIF, and other image formats. FTP from atari.archive.umich.edu:/atari/Graphics/Gemview/gview248.lzh. This is a well regarded viewer. The English documentation tends to be a few versions behind, though. For monochrome ST monitors, try MGIF, which manages to achieve four-level gray-scale effect by flickering. Version 4.2 loads JPEG files much faster than 4.1 did. FTP from atari.archive.umich.edu:/atari/Graphics/mgif42b.zoo. The free IJG JPEG software is available compiled for Atari ST/TT/etc from micros.hensa.ac.uk:/micros/atari/tos/p/p108/jpeg5abn.zoo. These programs convert JPEG to/from PPM, GIF, BMP, Targa formats. ------------------------------ Subject: [11] Acorn Archimedes The Acorn archive at micros.hensa.ac.uk contains several JPEG-capable programs. Read the file micros.hensa.ac.uk:/micros/arch/riscos/index for retrieval instructions. Recommended archive entries include: a022 Translator 7.18: image file format converter (shareware) b008 FYEO 2.01: For Your Eyes Only, fast JPEG/GIF image viewer (shareware) a110 JPEG 5.00: IJG v5 software (JPEG<=>PPM,GIF,Targa) w/ desktop front end !ChangeFSI, supplied with RISC OS 3 version 3.10, can convert from and view JPEG JFIF format. Provision is also made to convert images to JPEG, although this must be done from the CLI rather than by double-clicking. ------------------------------ Subject: [12] NeXT OmniImageFilter is a filter package that converts NeXTStep TIFF to and from about 30 image formats. It reads JPEG but does not write it. It works with most NeXTStep programs that handle drag-and-drop. OmniImage is a simple image viewer that uses the filter package. Both are free. Available from ftp.omnigroup.com:/pub/software/OmniImageFilter-3.0.pkg.tar and ftp.omnigroup.com:/pub/software/OmniImage-3.0.1.pkg.tar. ImageViewer is a PD utility that displays images and can do some format conversions. The current version reads JPEG but does not write it. ImageViewer is available from the NeXT archives at sonata.cc.purdue.edu and cs.orst.edu:/pub/next/3.0/bin/ImageViewer0.9i.tar.Z. Note that there is an older version floating around that does not support JPEG. NeXTStep includes built-in support for TIFF/JPEG, but not for the Usenet-standard JFIF format. Be warned that the TIFF/JPEG standard is about to change away from the flavor currently produced by NeXTStep, so compatibility with other platforms is doubtful. ------------------------------ Subject: [13] Other systems If you don't see what you want for your machine, check out the free IJG source code described in the next section. Assuming you have a C compiler and at least a little knowledge of compiling C programs, you should be able to prepare JPEG conversion programs from the source code. You'll also need a viewer program. If your display is 8 bits or less, any GIF viewer will do fine; if you have a display with more color capability, try to find a viewer that can read Targa, BMP, or PPM 24-bit image files. ------------------------------ Subject: [14] Freely available source code for JPEG Free, portable C code for JPEG compression is available from the Independent JPEG Group. Source code, documentation, and test files are included. Version 5a is available from ftp.uu.net:/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v5a.tar.gz. If you are on a PC you may prefer ZIP archive format, which you can find at oak.oakland.edu:/SimTel/msdos/graphics/jpgsrc5a.zip (or at any Simtel mirror site). On CompuServe, see the GRAPHSUPPORT forum (GO GRAPHSUP), library 12, file jpgs5a.zip. The IJG code includes a reusable JPEG compression/decompression library, plus sample applications "cjpeg" and "djpeg", which perform conversion between JPEG JFIF format and image files in PPM/PGM (PBMPLUS), GIF, BMP, Utah RLE, and Targa formats. Two small applications "wrjpgcom" and "rdjpgcom" insert and extract textual comments in JFIF files. The package is highly portable; it has been used successfully on many machines ranging from Apple IIs to Crays. The IJG code is free for both noncommercial and commercial use; only an acknowledgement in your documentation is required to use it in a product. (See the README file in the distribution for details.) A different free JPEG implementation, written by the PVRG group at Stanford, is available from havefun.stanford.edu:/pub/jpeg/JPEGv1.2.tar.Z. The PVRG code is designed for research and experimentation rather than production use; it is slower, harder to use, and less portable than the IJG code, but the PVRG code is easier to understand. Also, the PVRG code supports lossless JPEG, while the IJG code does not. ------------------------------ Subject: [15] Where are FAQ lists archived? Many FAQs are crossposted to news.answers. Well-run netnews sites will have the latest versions available in that newsgroup. However, there are a *lot* of postings in news.answers, and they can be hard to sort through. The latest versions of news.answers postings are archived at rtfm.mit.edu. You can retrieve this FAQ by FTP as /pub/usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part1 and /pub/usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part2. If you have no FTP access, send e-mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu containing the lines send usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part1 send usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part2 (If you don't get a reply, the server may be misreading your return address; add a line such as "path myname@mysite" to specify your correct e-mail address to reply to.) For more info about the FAQ archive, retrieve the file rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/news-answers/introduction. The same FAQs are also available in the World Wide Web; see the index at http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/FAQ-List.html. This FAQ is http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/jpeg-faq/top.html. -- tom lane organizer, Independent JPEG Group tgl@netcom.com or tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us