Technology
Why JPEG Artifacts Appear in Certain Colors More Than Others
JPEG compression artifacts are not evenly distributed across an image. Red tones, high-saturation edges, and sharp color transitions suffer far worse than neutral grays or muted blues. The reason is structural: JPEG splits color information into separate channels and discards most of the color detail while preserving luminance. The human visual system is built to tolerate exactly this trade-off — until saturation gets high enough that the discarded color data becomes visible.