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So I've always noticed this for years watching anime, I always look at anime
characters and they seem to have to kind of milky/blurry texture on their
skin/clothes. It's not to noticeable to some people, but hopefully you can see
what I mean with these pictures.

**(Click the pictures and zoom in for a better idea of what I mean.)**

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hI3BT.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hI3BT.jpg)

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1GCAn.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1GCAn.jpg)

I copy and pasted the pics in Photoshop and used the eye drop tool on
different areas of the skin and clothes. The color codes jump around
everywhere so they can't be solid.

Could it be that these frames were scanned in at a certain DPI? Maybe
something as a result of an editing software like After Effects? Or maybe it's
the texture of the paper?


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question
anime-production
Why do animes have this "milky"-like texture?


This happens if you encode a video with a lossy codec. In each frame the solid
colors are actually drawn solid. But at the moment where they get converted
into a video, a lossy compression is used. Lossy data compression discards
some data from each frame so it becomes small (within the meaning of computer
memory) enough to be stored on for example a DVD or so it is possible to
stream them over the internet.

> Compression artifacts occur in many common media such as DVDs, common
> computer file formats such as JPEG, MP3, or MPEG files, and some
> alternatives to the compact disc, such as Sony's MiniDisc format.
> Uncompressed media (such as on Laserdiscs, Audio CDs, and WAV files) or
> losslessly compressed media (such as FLAC or PNG) do not suffer from
> compression artifacts.

If you look close to the image you can see some kind of a square pattern (two
are highlighted with circles), also called artifacts, that appears if you use
lossy compression.

![Artifacts](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MgurW.png)

A other effect that occurs is that the color is changing. Here is a example
where the left image is a lossless png file and the right image a very high
compressed jpg image:

![lossless](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Eq8WD.png)![lossy](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fdFch.jpg)

The image to the left needs 168 KByte on the disc while the right only needs 2
KByte. If you want to know the reason why these artifacts are appearing, read
the articles I provide below.

Information and image from
[Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_artifact) and more
information from [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy_compression).


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2015-02-14T13:41:16.700
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answer


So as you already know this happens due to loss of image data due to
compression. This effect gets more noticeable, the lower target quality/size
is for the video.

To get better screenshots, in case you don't need a particular frame of a
scene, you should always go for the keyframes. In lossy video compression
algos, keyframes are inserted now and then in the video stream and they
contain an initial representation of a new scene, from which the fragments
start moving around, so that any static fragments may not take up valuable
data bits in the stream. After these fragments start moving, the image gets
blurry, you start seeing artifacts, etc. Some players and most video editing
apps show you when you've paused at a keyframe.


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answer