I thought I saw an article in a magazine a while back describing a techniques for lessening the "christmas tree" artifacts that one encounters in jpeg compressed images. I can't locate that article and I'm wondering if I was dreaming. Has anyone written about this topic? It seems that this would be very appropriate to all of us digital photographers.

Thank

-- Kevin Wildermuth (kwilder@jps.net), October 02, 1999

Answers

What about a slight blurring of the image to get rid of the black "fuzz" around sharp transitions of brightness, then possibly unsharp masking to re-sharpen the result a little bit?

-- bruce komusin (bkomusin@bigfoot.com), October 03, 1999.

Further thoughts: I've found that for highly-compressed web photos (the ones you'd likely want to remove artifacts from) it is often the case that they are low in resolution too, i.e. 100x200 or something small like that. It is best to resample to 2 or 4 times original size FIRST -- this alone often smooths out fuzz artifacts -- then apply additional gaussian blur as I described above.

-- bruce komusin (bkomusin@bigfoot.com), October 04, 1999.