cryoburner :
That is pretty much a non-issue. Render the image at double the width and height you intend to use for your final output, then simply scale down to the size you want. Four pixels will become one, and any jpeg artifacts should become invisible at the subpixel level.
There's no point in making a super-resolution screenshot if you're just going to scale it down to regular-resolution, though, is there?
cryoburner :
And there's nothing saying you have to keep saving the image as jpeg between edits. Use a lossless format when saving your changes, and if you need to reopen your edited file for further modifications, you won't be adding any artifacts.
True, I don't have to save to jpeg multiple times, but I also have absolutely no control over the jpeg quality source I'm getting.
Therefore I have no way of knowing how far the picture will deteriorate if I decide to save it as jpeg, because the source is already a jpeg itself.
cryoburner :
For really large images, jpeg is simply the most practical option. PNG format becomes impractical at those kinds of resolutions. Going by the original resolution they stated for their test image, the PNG version would have likely been over 10 GB, compared to 1.75 GB for the jpeg version, and the resulting file would be much slower to save and load.
Which is a non-issue itself.
If they
were issues, I'd just have Ansel save a jpeg instead of a png, wouldn't I? Except I can't, because there's no option to do it. I'm forced to use jpeg, whether I like it or not.
Also, the game is paused during Ansel, so who care about speed? Overwatch is capable of saving super-resolution screenshots mid-game (in uncompressed bmp) without any noticeable lag; presumably by cloning the world state and having another CPU thread render the frame directly to disk.
cryoburner :
And remember, we're talking about games here.
Which need to explicitly support Ansel...
cryoburner :
Games already use lossy, upscaled images for their textures
... which are going to lose even more quality when saved as jpeg (source image), edited, and saved as jpeg
again.
cryoburner :
and use polygonal models that can look angular when viewed down at the pixel level. Just click on the second screenshot in this article, and have a look at the blurry, cardboard cutout tree and flower textures in the background, or the rectangular branches coming out of the tree, or even the caterpillar whiskers on his face.
Since the game needs to explicitly support Ansel, it may change its behavior in Ansel mode to render the best possible frame, especially when saving the screenshot. The Witcher 3 is a game that was made way before Ansel was even a thing, so its engine obviously wasn't meant for Answel, hence the poor quality.
cryoburner :
These games are designed to look "good enough" in motion at typical screen resolutions, while maintaining reasonable performance, and are optimized to reduce detail in places where it is less noticeable. They are not designed for being analyzed at ultra-high resolutions, so they will show lots of rough edges when viewed up close. The game is outputting a lossy image to begin with, and at high resolutions, these visual anomalies will be far more noticeable than anything resulting from jpeg compression.
Who's to say that future games won't be designed to also look good in Ansel?
Try not to develop too much tunnel vision here.
cryoburner :
Also, I don't think many people are realizing just how high the maximum resolution for this actually is. Most current-generation, professional-level SLR cameras output images in the 20-40 megapixel range. The maximum resolution available here is well over 2,000 megapixels, or 50 to 100 times what a professional-level camera would provide. You simply won't need that kind of resolution in practice, and I can see no reason anyone would benefit from using the full 63,360 x 35,640 resolution for a screenshot.
You forget that professional-level cameras record reality, while screenshots record a virtual (discrete) world.
Each pixel on a real camera receives light from an infinite amount of infinitely small sources, which are blurred together to form the effective pixel you'll see on the picture.
On a virtual camera, however, each pixel only receives light from a single (infinitely small) source. That's how aliasing happens; which you'll never see in a real picture, by the way.
And don't tell me I can just turn on AA.
Many modern games only support AA by using some sort of post-processing blur filter.
For those that support MSAA or SSAA, you'd either need a GPU powerful enough to play the games with those on, or go through the menu to turn them on before taking a screenshot and turn them off afterwards. Who's going to do such a thing, if you can just take a super-resolution screenshot without having to mess with your settings?
Not to mention that your mouse is going to lag like crazy if your GPU can't handle the current graphics setting, all just so you can take a high quality screenshot.
And since we're already talking about professional-level cameras. Did you know they use a format called DNG (Digital NeGative) which takes significantly more storage space than bmp (to say nothing of png and jpg)?
Some people just want the highest possible quality so they have the highest possible control over the final image.
Of course you can always set up the camera to save a jpeg instead. It's something called "option". If you can have it, why not have it?
cryoburner :
Again, the details won't even even look particularly good up close due to the nature of videogame graphics. Super resolution screenshots make much more sense to use at the lower 2x, 3x, 4x levels, and if you really don't want jpeg artifacts, simply double that amount, then scale your image down.
Again, there's no point in taking a super-resolution screenshot which you're just going to scale back down anyway. It makes sense for a real-world camera, because of pixel noise. However, there is no pixel noise in a game. Why are you so proud about artificially introduced undesirable noise anyway?
cryoburner :
Aside from testing the feature out, it's simply not practical, or even particularly useful to save screenshots that are hundreds of megabytes or more in size.
"
640 kB ought to be enough for anybody" am I right?
The funny part is, the above quote was actually correct. Then the future happened. Like I said before: Try not to develop too much tunnel vision here.
cryoburner :
They will be slow to take, potentially requiring multiple minutes to render, slow to save, load or edit, will waste a lot of disk space
Yeah, so?
Those who know what they want to achieve with Ansel aren't going to care about how much size those pictures take.
The only people who have a problem with this are people who can't find any practical use for Ansel, aside from testing the feature out. Hmm, doesn't that remind me of someone? Oh, wait, that's
you!
cryoburner :
and will not be uploadable to most image hosting services or viewable in browsers unless scaled way down anyway.
But a 1 GB jpeg is uploadable? Yeah, right.
You probably don't realize it, but people who take pictures with real cameras usually don't upload DNGs either.
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