San Bei Ji

Photoshop vs. Fireworks on JPEG Compression

I was just working on a new website’s banner image. It is fairly large - about 760 x 200 pixels, and I wanted to give it a good crank on the JPEG compression. Uncompressed the image was just over 100K. A quick pass in the default Photoshop Save for Web feature on the High JPEG setting (60% compression) yielded a file about 45K in size, with lots of piexated artifacts around the text edges. Trying the same run in Fireworks at the default “High” setting gave me a very crisp image with little noise around the text and rich color variances at 33K. Just a quick and unscientific test, but Fireworks won this comparison hands down, with a better quality image and a smaller file size.