Philosophy

Isolated vertical or horizontal lines in gel images are not jpg compression artifacts

I frequently find the PubPeer excuse of compression artifacts in doctored images.

So lets have a look at that issue using the jpegoptim (manpage) and also jpeginfo (manpage). These are the usual effects

  • Ringing – high contrast areas with waves
  • Contouring, Banding, Pposterisation – extreme brightness changes
  • Staircase noise – along curving edges
  • Blockiness in “busy” regions – may mimick duplications
  • Gibbs phenomenon – small highlighted area of large contrast
  • Alias, MoirĂ©, frequent color/brightness change

Now let’s have a look at the compression artifacts in descending quality (BTW this also good exercise for the upcoming 125kB Content Upload Filter, I am therefore adding  filesize also)

 

original image 893kB

maximum image quality factor 64% 172kB
maximum image quality factor 32% 105kB
maximum image quality factor 16% 65kB
maximum image quality factor 8% 38kB
maximum image quality factor 4% 23KB
maximum image quality factor 3% 19kB
maximum image quality factor 2% 18kB
maximum image quality factor 1% 18kB

Maybe the most frequent issue that I see in published PDFs is the 4% or 8% blockiness in the shadow area.

Issues like sharp vertical or horizontal lines in images of gel blots are no compression artifacts but due to to rectangle selections from copied image areas.

Related posts: Reading behind the lines | Image modification in scientific publications: 10 rules for acceptable use | Photoshopped | Snapshot of your working directory | Central limit theorem |