Friday, 7 July 2017

HEIF: Here's Everything You Need To Know about 'JPG-Killing' Format!

HEIF: Here's Everything You Need To Know about 'JPG-Killing' Format!



Yeah. You read that right. High Efficiency Image File Format or HEIF is a new file format for individual images and image sequences. It was developed by Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and the requirements were properly defined in 2013. It took about 1.5 years to develop and was finalized in summer 2015. It has been in news recently since Apple has announced support for this new format in their new operating systems, iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra.

So what is so special about this format? Well, for starters, it takes a lot less storage space than JPG or JPEG. So it will be beneficial for low storage space devices. Second of all, there's absolutely no loss of quality so it retains higher image quality than its JPEG alternative. In fact, the MPEG group claims that twice as much information can be stored in a HEIF image as a JPEG one of the same size.

Moreover, they can be converted easily to JPG or JPEG, which we have been using for a long time now. The fact that HEIF also supports 10-bit deep colour images will come as a blessed relief for mobile photographers who have seen those mystical sunset images compromised by ugly banding caused by the 8 bits currently on offer. And since Apple has adopted this technology into their devices, it may be implemented in the next Android Version.

So that's all you need to know about HEIF. But before I leave, take a look at this JPG vs HEIF comparison :

Screen Shot 2017-07-04 at 8.30.34 PM.png

Here's close up view of above images :

Screen Shot 2017-07-04 at 8.30.55 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-07-04 at 8.31.22 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-07-04 at 8.31.41 PM.png


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