Anyone working with digital art knows the distinction between the file in which the work is actually made, often in a proprietary format, and the file exported for publication. Using PNG for graphic material such as typography, lettering, and flat shapes, while choosing some form of JPEG for photographic material, is therefore nothing new.

You may also have seen some of my notes on ImageMagick, such as Figuring Out a New Workflow Pipeline Based on Asset-Type Processing. There, compression appears mainly as a practical decision made before an image is uploaded to social media.

However, after leaving a comment beneath a graphic work by @jacobjoaquin on Instagram, and while writing this post to accompany its Tumblr repost, I understood compression differently. Just as I have used a handheld scanner to deliberately distort a printout, texture, or surface, I can use image compression as a method of image-making. Compression does not merely reduce or damage an existing image. Its artefacts can become part of the intended result.

This may clash with the conventions of social platforms, whose own compression processes are largely outside our control. But most of us also have some box of our own somewhere on the internet, a place where an image can be hosted exactly as we intended it to appear.

Quelle: Code & Canvas