How can this image be a JPEG with a size of 3.4 MB!? I've checked, it's really a JPEG but how is that possible!? I can't tag it as png_overkill! Motherfuck!!! Someone explain this to me, is it the colorful background?
It's been saved as a max quality jpeg for minimal artifacts, but a magazine scan of comparable resolution yields an image about 1/3 the size at the same jpeg quality level. Seems that random noise backgrounds don't compress well.
Which is strange because there doesn't seem to be a lot of variation in color, I even re-saved it without compression but only got it down to 2.65 MB. Geez.
Progressive display cans that theory. The picture stops downloading as soon as it finishes displaying. Nah, it's just a really horribly compressed JPEG. And yeah, these "random noise backgrounds" are actually a huge mess of tiny areas of slightly varying color, which is hell on the JPEG algorithm.