Comparing JPEG High Quality Levels

Windows Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟JPEG Image File Format Quality and Size

∟Comparing JPEG High Quality Levels

This section provides a quick comparison of image quality of JPEG image files with different compression quality levels 95%, 90%, and 85%.

One main advantage of using JPEG image file format is that you can increase the compression rate by lower the quality level to reduce the file size. Let's compare 3 high quality levels: 95%, 90% and 85%.

1. Open GIMP-Red-Gradient-Spiral.xcf and save it as GIMP-Red-Gradient-Spiral_095.jpg in JPEG format with a 95 quality level.

2. Open GIMP-Red-Gradient-Spiral.xcf and save it as GIMP-Red-Gradient-Spiral_090.jpg in JPEG format with a 90 quality level.

3. Open GIMP-Red-Gradient-Spiral.xcf and save it as GIMP-Red-Gradient-Spiral_085.jpg in JPEG format with a 85 quality level.

4. Open all JPEG files with Microsoft Paint and view them in Zoom/Large Size mode. We can do comparison of different JPEG quality levels now:

Note that:

Image saved with a JPEG quality level of 85%: The quality deterioration is very visible. 85% is actually considered as a good quality by Microsoft, because its Paint program always uses 85% as the compression quality level to save JPEG image files.
Image saved with a JPEG quality level of 90%: The quality deterioration is still noticeable. As a comparison, 91% is considered as the STD (Standard) quality by Sony for my digital camera.
Image saved with a JPEG quality level of 95% and 100%: The quality deterioration is not noticeable any more. My Sony digital camera uses 97% as the Fine quality level.

Of course, higher JPEG quality level results larger image file size:

    3,364 GIMP_Red_Gradient_Spiral_085.jpg
    3,973 GIMP_Red_Gradient_Spiral_090.jpg
    5,302 GIMP_Red_Gradient_Spiral_095.jpg
   10,914 GIMP_Red_Gradient_Spiral_100.jpg