Tutorial: What are JPEG Artifacts and How do I Remove Them?

"JPEG image artifacts" refers to the unwanted blocks, dots, and fringes in JPEG compressed image.

Nowadays, majority of images from digital cameras, webpages, and other sources are JPEG images.  If the image is highly compressed to reduce size, e.g. those post in webpages, you can easily notice the JPEG artifacts. Even with high quality JPEG images, you can still be annoyed by the unwanted artifacts when you enlarge, sharpen, or print large size pictures. Topaz DeJPEG can elliminate JPEG artifact almost completely. You will find it is one of the most often used operation in your image enhancement.

Here is a picture posted on the Internet. It is compressed at around 60 of quality level. It look pretty good to casual viewer.

However, if you view it closely at 200% zoom (the meddle picture), you can see very typical JPEG compression artifacts. Around sharp edges such as the words and build edges, there are many "fringes", dots etc.

Topaz DeJPEG can elliminate these JPEG artifacts effectively and enhance the clarity and details of the image at the same time. Here is the result after using Topaz DeJPEG filter.

This is another example of JPEG compressed image, which is compress at quality=25 and view at 200%. Due to high compression, the JPEG artifacts are obvious. Here the pictures show strong "blockiness" which is another typical JPEG artifacts.

Topaz DeJPEG elliminates these JPEG artifacts effectively and enhance the clarity and details of the image at the same time.

Another example: Topaz DeJPEG(tm) filter in Topaz Vivacity effectively removes JPEG compression artifacts and noises in this picture too.

Here is the original JPEG picture.

Here is the result of applying Topaz DeJPEG.

Topaz Vivacity also have a filter to reduce artifacts caused by JPEG 2000 and other wavelet based image compression. The picture below is the original J2K compressed image

Here is the result of applying Topaz DeJPEG2000.