A digital image processing determining the extent of blocking and contouring artifacts in a digital image includes the steps of: determining the extent of blocking artifacts using the column and row difference arrays; determining the extent of contouring artifacts based on an estimated DC quantization step size; and, determining a composite artifact measure as a function of the extent of blocking artifacts and extent of contouring artifacts. A digital image processing method determining the extent of contouring artifacts in the digital image includes the steps of: forming a column difference image; averaging the values in the columns in the column difference image to produce a column difference array; computing the average of the values in the column difference array that are separated by one block width to produce a block averaged column difference array; locating the peak value in the block averaged column difference array; repeating the above mentioned steps in the row direction; locating block boundaries based on the locations of peak values of column and row difference arrays; calculating DC value for each block; generating a histogram of the block DC values; calculating the Fourier transform of the histogram; locating the first non-DC peak in the Fourier transform domain; calculating a DC quantization step size based on the frequency of the first non-DC peak; and, employing the DC quantization step size as a measure of the extent of the contouring artifacts in the digital image.