Which Graphics Format Compresses Massive, Single-Colour Images Best?

Last week we saw comparisons between image formats for single-pixel images. But what about the other extreme — massive, single-colour pictures? Once again, Cloudinary’s Jon Sneyers dives into the world of compression to see if JPEG, PNG or GIF comes out on top.

Sneyers decided to keep it simple, using two images, one black the other white. The resolution on the other hand was anything but ordinary: a huge 16,383 x 16,383 pixels for both. The ratios between the shades wasn’t much different except for a few cases.

As fate would have it, none of the competitors mentioned in the first paragraph was the best. The winner of the one-pixel shootout from last time, PBM, was the worst here, essentially storing pixels one-to-one at a whopping 33.5MB.

Turns out FLIF, or Free Lossless Image Format was far away the best at 19 and 15 bytes for white and black respectively. Out of JPEG, PNG and GIF, PNG came out on top at 53,132 and 32,645 bytes.

Hit up the article below for a full comparison.

A one-color image is worth two thousand words [Cloudinary, via Reddit]


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