ABSTRACT
The growth and maturation of a visual medium happens when creatives are able to create, imagine, make, capture and share new work. Though purely creative types may not think of their creations as boiling down to digital data, the reality is that photographs (along with graphic design, video and audio) are built on the foundational building blocks of ones and zeroes. When we create millions of new pixels, dozens of composite layers or hours of high-definition video, the challenge of storing all of this digital information can't be ignored. This textbook has so far highlighted the hardware used to house this data (see Chapter 8 on the topic of File Storage) and approaches to managing it. Still, we'd drown in data if it weren't for compression techniques that help to keep files reasonably sized. Applying compression to photographic data is a key technological necessity in the digital 250realm. Here, we explore the details of image compression mechanisms by reviewing the concepts of information redundancy, the primary algorithmic approaches to compressing data and the potential image quality artifacts that crop up.
