A smooth kernel interpolates. On a photograph that is right; on a drawing it is destructive in a way
that shows up as SIZE rather than as blur — a logo with 174 flat colours downscaled with lanczos3
comes out with thousands of interpolated ones, and the lossless encoder that was winning a moment ago
then has to describe every one.
Measured on fofos-logo-saffron at 160 pixels, all lossless:
lanczos3 13,356 mitchell + nearLossless 7,982
mitchell 9,854 nearest 3,436
The whole 300-pixel original is 8,886. Every smooth option produced a 160-pixel file heavier than the
full-size one, which is what "the ladder made it worse" looks like from the inside.
The cost is real and accepted: nearest at a fractional scale drops rows rather than blending them, so
edges alias. These renditions are shown smaller than they are and the browser's own downscale smooths
what nearest left behind — a 160-pixel logo in an 80-pixel slot is where this lives.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
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