ImageMagick JPEG compression block size - imagemagick

Does anyone know what processing block size (8x8 or 16x16 ??) is used in JPEG compression by ImageMagick? And, is there a way to change this default block size?

Please refer en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG. It says "After subsampling, each channel must be split into 8×8 blocks. Depending on chroma subsampling, this yields (Minimum Coded Unit) MCU blocks of size 8×8 (4:4:4 – no subsampling), 16×8 (4:2:2), or most commonly 16×16 (4:2:0).

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PNG Compression Not Reducing the size of images

I have certain png files. They are of size approx 1MB. I tried several command but they didn't work for me. Any suggestions. One is as below :
"C:\\Program Files\\ImageMagick-6.9.9-Q16\\mogrify.exe" -depth 8 -format png -define PNG:compression-strategy=2 -define PNG:compression-filter=0 test.png
Thanks,
As pointed out by #fmw42 in comments, your image may already be optimized. Also, #Mark's comment regarding reducing colors is true.
But apart from this, the important thing to know is that "there is no ideal command". You will have to figure out bit depth in your color channels and reduce them. There will always be a trade-off between reducing colors and quality you wish to pick.
Apart from that, there can also be other methods that you can use:
If opacity of PNG is fully opaque, you can strip alpha channel as it
makes no sense in that case. This can give you some file size savings.
If the image is visibly grayscale and still color type is
true-color, true-color-alpha or indexed-color, you can make significant savings by saving the image with a grayscale color space.
Retry optimizing PNG files using adaptive delta filtering and LZ77 Optimizations. This can be done easily using "optipng". But if the image is already optimized enough, this won't provide significant file sizes reduction. Moreover, choice of filtering depends upon png bit depths, so you would have to look up and understand PNG compression from various documentation available online regarding PNG compression.

Max size of Jpeg2000 image

According to Jpeg2000 specs, Xsiz & Ysiz can have values ranging from 1 to (2pow32 -1). That means Max size of jpeg2000 file should be (2pow32 -1)*(2pow32 -1) which is very huge.
Am I missing anything here? or Is there any other limitation on the Xsiz, Ysiz or image size?
The maximum resolution of a JPEG 2000 compliant codestream is, as you point out, 2^32-1 x 2^32-1 pixels. However:
It is the decompressed file that will have a maximum size of pixels 2^32-1 x 2^32-1. However, to obtain the actual decompressed file size you need to multiply that by the number of components and the number of bytes per sample.
As Piglet points out, the compressed file size will (hopefully) be smaller, that's the whole point of image compression: producing compressed files smaller than the uncompressed images.
Even though compliant codestreams may have up to that resolution, it doesn't mean that your encoder/decoder implementation necessarily support images that big. JPEG 2000 introduced the concept of "compliance class", which is a system of guarantees of the minimum dimensions (among other things) supported by a given implementation. In practice, you're probably better off testing what the maximum supported size is.

jpeg lossless transformations - memory consumption?

i have just downloaded the latest win32 jpegtran.exe from http://jpegclub.org/jpegtran/ and observed the following:
i have prepared a 24 BPP jpeg test image with 14500 x 10000 pixels.
compressed size in file system is around 7.5 MB.
decompressing into memory (with some image viewer) inflates to around 450 MB.
monitoring the jpegtran.exe command line tool's memory consumption during lossless rotation (180) i can see the process consuming up to 900 MB memory!
i would have assumed that such jpeg lossless transformations don't require decoding the image file into memory and instead would just perform some mathematical transformations on the encoded file itself - keeping the memory footprint very low.
so which of the following is true?
some bug in this particular tool's implementation
some configuration switch i have missed
some misunderstanding at my end (i.e. jpeg lossless transformations also need to decode the image into memory?)
the "mathematical operations" consuming even more memory than "decoding the image into memory"
edit:
according to the answer by JasonD the reason seems to be the latter one. so i'll extend my question:
are there any implementations that can do those operations in small chunks (to avoid high memory usage)? or does it always need to be done on the whole and there's no way around it?
PS:
i'm not planning to implement my own codec / algorithm. instead i'm asking if there are any implementations out there that meet my requirements. or if there could be in theory, at least.
I don't know about the library in question, but in order to perform a lossless rotation on a jpeg image, you would at least have to decompress the DCT coefficients in order to rotate them, and then re-compress.
The DCT coefficients, fully expanded, will be the same size or larger than the original image data, as they have more bits of information.
It's lossless, because the loss in a jpeg is caused by quantization of the DCT coefficients. So long as you don't decode/re-encode/re-quantize these, no loss will be incurred.
But it will be memory intensive.
jpeg compression works very roughly as follows:
Convert image into YCbCr colour space.
Optionally downsample some of the channels (colour error is less perceptible than luminance error, so it is typical to 2x downsample the chroma channels). This is obviously lossy, but very predictably/stably so.
Transform 8x8 blocks of the image by a discrete cosine transform (DCT), moving the image into frequency space. The DCT coefficients are also in an 8x8 block, and use more bits for storage than the 8-bit image data did.
Quantize the DCT coefficients by a variable amount (this is the quality setting in most packages). The aim is to produce as many small and especially zero coefficients as possible. The is the main "lossy" aspect of jpeg compression.
Zig-zag through the 2D data to turn it into a 1D stream of coefficients which is roughly in frequency order. High frequencies are more likely to be zero'd out, so many packets will ideally end in a stream of zeros which can be truncated.
Compress (non-lossily) the (now quite compressible) data using huffman encoding.
So a 'non-lossy' transformation would want to avoid doing as much as possible of that - especially anything beyond the DCT quantization, but that does not avoid expanding the data.

ImageMagick help -- need to change DPI

I have a 1000x1000 300dpi image that I need to convert to a 100x100 96dpi thumbnail. How do I do this in ImageMagick? I'm after the smallest possible file size at the highest possible quality.
Doing something like this:
convert myimage.png -quality 100 -resize 100 PNG8:mynewimage.png
.... does change the dimension, but still maintains the DPI. If I can get this to change to 96dpi, I should get a smaller file size.
I've tried -density, etc., but can't seem to make them work for me. Maybe I put the commands in the wrong order or passed the wrong parameters. Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
The short version is, if you want a 100x100 image in PNG format, the line you have will already give you best quality at smallest file size. You can't do any better than that without a) coding to a lossy format (JPEG) or b) reducing the color depth of your image.
For a slightly longer explanation, straight from Wikipedia: "Dots per inch (DPI) is a measure of spatial printing or video dot density, in particular the number of individual dots that can be placed in a line within the span of 1 inch (2.54 cm). The DPI value tends to correlate with image resolution, but is related only indirectly."
DPI has nothing to do with getting a smaller file size; your 100x100 image measures 100x100 pixels, no matter whether you see it on a 300dpi screen or a 96dpi one (it will just look smaller on the 300dpi screen). The amount of information is the same either way.
"-density" won't help either, as it only works when "encoding a raster image while rendering (reading) vector formats such as Postscript, PDF, WMF, and SVG into a raster image". Those formats are resolution-independant, so it makes sense to tell ImageMagick the DPI to which you want the image rasterized. However, your DPI should be a function of the output device you plan to use. In your case, since you're starting with an already-rasterized image, this has no use.
PNG is a lossless format, so the -quality parameter only controls the zlib compression level; any gains in image size will be minimal, but it's worth using.

Is it possible to tell the quality level of a JPEG?

This is really a two part question, since I don't fully understand how these things work just yet:
My situation: I'm writing a web app which lets the user upload an image. My app then resizes to something displayable (eg: 640x480-ish) and saves the file for use later.
My questions:
Given an arbitrary JPEG file, is it possible to tell what the quality level is, so that I can use that same quality when saving the resized image?
Does this even matter?? Should I be saving all the images at a decent level (eg: 75-80), regardless of the original quality?
I'm not so sure about this because, as I figure it: (let's take an extreme example), if someone had a 5 megapixel image saved at quality 0, it would be blocky as anything. Reducing the image size to 640x480, the blockiness would be smoothed out and barely less noticeable... until I saved it with quality 0 again...
On the other end of the spectrum, if there was an image which was 800x600 with q=0, resizing to 640x480 isn't going to change the fact that it looks like utter crap, so saving with q=80 would be redundant.
Am I even close?
I'm using GD2 library on PHP if that is of any use
You can view compress level using the identify tool in ImageMagick. Download and installation instructions can be found at the official website.
After you install it, run the following command from the command line:
identify -format '%Q' yourimage.jpg
This will return a value from 0 (low quality, small filesize) to 100 (high quality, large filesize).
Information source
JPEG is a lossy format. Every time you save a JPEG same image, regardless of quality level, you will reduce the actual image quality. Therefore even if you did obtain a quality level from the file, you could not maintain that same quality when you save a JPEG again (even at quality=100).
You should save your JPEG at as high a quality as you can afford in terms of file size. Or use a loss-less format such as PNG.
Low quality JPEG files do not simply become more blocky. Instead colour depth is reduced and the detail of sections of the image are removed. You can't rely on lower quality images being blocky and looking ok at smaller sizes.
According to the JFIF spec. the quality number (0-100) is not stored in the image header, although the horizontal and vertical pixel density is stored.
For future visitors, checking the quality of a given jpeg, you could just use imagemagick tooling:
$> identify -format '%Q' filename.jpg
92%
Jpeg compression algorithm has some parameters which influence on the quality of the result image.
One of such parameters are quantization tables which defines how many bits will be used on each coefficient. Different programs use different quatization tables.
Some programs allow user to set quality level 0-100. But there is no common defenition of this number. The image made with Photoshop with 60% quality takes 46 KB, while the image made with GIMP takes only 26 KB.
Quantization tables are also different.
There are other parameters such subsampling, dct method and etc.
So you can't describe all of them by single quality level number and you can't compare quality of jpeg images by single number. But you can create such number like photoshop or gimp which will describe compromiss between size on quality.
More information:
http://patrakov.blogspot.com/2008/12/jpeg-quality-is-meaningless-number.html
Common practice is that you resize the image to appropriate size and apply jpeg after that. In this case huge and middle images will have the same size and quality.
Here is a formula I've found to work well:
jpg100size (the size it should not exceed in bytes for 98-100% quality) = width*height/1.7
jpgxsize = jpg100size*x (x = percent, e.g. 0.65)
so, you could use these to find out statistically what quality your jpg was last saved at. if you want to get it down to let's say 65% quality and if you want to avoid resampling, you should compare the size initially to make sure it's not already too low, and only then reduce the quality
As there are already two answers using identify, here's one that also outputs the file name (for scanning multiple files at once):
If you wish to have a simple output of filename: quality for use on multiple images, you can use
identify -format '%f: %Q' *
to show the filename + compression of all files within the current directory.
So, there are basically two cases you care about:
If an incoming image has quality set too high, it may take up an inappropriate amount of space. Therefore, you might want, for example, to reduce incoming q=99 to q=85.
If an incoming image has quality set too low, it might be a waste of space to raise it's quality. Except that an image that's had a large amount of data discarded won't magically take up more space when the quality is raised -- blocky images will compress very nicely even at high quality settings. So, in my opinion it's perfectly OK to raise incoming q=1 to q=85.
From this I would think simply forcing a decent quality setting is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.
Every new save of the file will further decrease overall quality, by using higher quality values you will preserve more of image. Regardless of what original image quality was.
If you resave a JPEG using the same software that created it originally, using the same settings, you'll find that the damage is minimized - the algorithm will tend to throw out the same information it threw out the first time. I don't think there's any way to know what level was selected just by looking at the file; even if you could, different software almost guarantees different parameters and rounding, making a match almost impossible.
This may be a silly question, but why would you be concerned about micromanaging the quality of the document? I believe if you use ImageMagick to do the conversion, it will manage the quality of the JPEG for you for best effect. http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.imagick.php
Here are some ways to achieve your (1) and get it right.
There are ways to do this by fitting to the quantization tables. Sherloq - for example - does this:
https://github.com/GuidoBartoli/sherloq
The relevant (python) code is at https://github.com/GuidoBartoli/sherloq/blob/master/gui/quality.py
There is another algorithm written up in https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.00992 - you might consider contacting the author for any code etc.
You can also simulate file_size(image_dimensions,quality_level) and then invert that function/lookup table to get quality_level(image_dimensions,file_size). Hey presto!
Finally, you can adopt a brute-force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_level_analysis approach by calculating the difference between the original image and recompressed versions each saved at a different quality level. The quality level of the original is roughly the one for which the difference is minimized. Seems to work reasonably well (but is linear in the for-loop..).
Most often the quality factor used seems to be 75 or 95 which might help you to get to the result faster. Probably no-one would save a JPEG at 100. Probably no-one would usefully save it at < 60 either.
I can add other links for this as they become available - please put them in the comments.
If you trust Irfanview estimation of JPEG compression level you can extract that information from the info text file created by the following Windows line command (your path to i_view32.exe might be different):
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" <image-file> /info=txtfile
Jpg compression level is recorded in the IPTC data of an image.
Use exiftool (it's free) to get the exif data of an image then do a search on the returned string for "Photoshop Quality". Or at least put the data returned into a text document and check to see what's recorded. It may vary depending on the software used to save the image.
"Writer Name : Adobe Photoshop
Reader Name : Adobe Photoshop CS6
Photoshop Quality : 7"

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