Why so many editors don’t suggest saving/exporting to a lossless format when JPEG will degrade image?

Anyone frequently seeing amateur graphic content in the Internet is accustomed to diagrams and drawings in JPEG format. Certainly, creators of this garbage are mostly low-to-medium-skilled users, many of whom even don’t understand meanings of raster and compression well.

But what programmers/designers of these image editing software think about? Perhaps, there are reasons to save/export most images in JPEG. But when an image doesn’t contains any gradients, is it reasonable? Why do popular raster never suggest to choose PNG instead of JPEG? Ī have following hypotheses:

1. Diagrams and drawings are considered a minority usage of image-editing software.


2. Software designers do not care (variant: an imbecile ignorant about compression will not create a good image anyway), programmers don’t have incentives.


3. Software designers deemed that dialogs with format options could confuse a user, different filename extensions as well, etc.


4. Professional image-editing programs have a setup option that makes them avoid JPEG in such situations, but not default one, whereas (unprofessional) users are ignorant about it.

It is very unlikely that anybody deliberately prefers nasty artefacts visible, for example, near green lines on white background in JPEG. Note that Ī only few times edited anything in Adobe Photoshop and have little notion of modern proprietary raster editors.