NOTE: After writing this article and examining the photos, I found what the difference is. My tests were done in Apple’s Photos app on macOS Sierra. While this supports HEIC, as you can see in the screenshots, it clearly has issues. Testing on the macOS High Sierra golden master release, the photos are of similar quality (though the colors are a bit different). So the issue isn’t HEIC as such. However, if you plan to not upgrade to High Sierra, then definitely don’t turn on the setting for HEIC photos. They’ll look like crap.
NOTE 2: I’ve found that some photos still look like crap even with High Sierra. I’m switching back to JPEG, and you should look at your photos and see whether you think HEIC is good enough.
Apple has introduced HEIC as a new format for storing photos. They’re supposed to look good at smaller file sizes. My first test shows they actually suck.
I have a 10.5″ iPad Pro, which supports HEIC, the new format that Apple is offering for photos. You activate it in Settings > Camera:
I took a few photos, and I’m appalled at the quality. Here are a couple of examples.
The first photo was of Rosalind the Cat. Here’s the photo (cropped so I don’t have to scale it down), exported from Apple Photos as a JPEG:
Here’s a 300% zoom of her face; I took a screenshot of the zoom in Acorn:
The noise and artifacts are especially visible around the eyes.
I thought that perhaps the light was low, so I took two books, with which it’s easy to see whether the photos are crisp by looking at the text on their covers, and shot them next to a window. Here’s the overall photo shot in JPEG by my iPhone SE:
And here are screenshots of the book on the right, zoomed in on the title. The JPEG is first, and the HEIC second. These are both from screenshots of the photos in the Photos app, zoomed in around the same amount.
Aside from the color difference – which could have something to do with the camera on the iPhone and the iPad – you can clearly see how fuzzy the titles are. I’ll do a tighter zoom now, JPEG then HEIC:
The difference here is striking. I was wondering if the camera in the iPad Pro was of lower quality (even though it’s the same 12 Mp resolution) than the iPhone SE, but this Macworld article says that the iPad Pro 9.7″ has the same camera as the iPhone 6s, so presumably the camera on the iPad Pro 10.5″ is no worse than that. I believe that the iPhone SE has the same camera too.
This format is new, and perhaps there’s something that is not optimized yet, either in iOS 11 or in the Photos app, but the HEIC photos I’ve taken for my tests are simply horrible.