Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Libtiff goes offline

madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 121 posts

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#91

Post by boudewijnrempt »

DiThi wrote: post #87
wtracy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know of any other application-independent image format with good support for layers. Seriously. (Even Tiff doesn't really have good support for layers.) .PSD is tightly tied to Photoshop's internals, and .xcf is tightly tied to Gimp's internals. (The Gimp core developers explicitly recommend against using .xcf as an interchange format, even though the format has a fairly complete publicly available spec.) I'v…

What happened with the OpenRaster format?

It's doing fine. It's the native format for MyPaint, Krita supports it, Scribus supports it. Gimp's support is outdated, but that's because Gimp gets releases so rarely.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#92

Post by rleigh »

banachtarski wrote: post #7

Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time. edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format. It will be better than TIFF

TIFF is one of the most open and flexible file formats out there.

PNG offers only a tiny subset of what's possible with TIFF. Note that TIFF supports multiple compression formats, lossless and lossy, multiple sample formats and sample counts, very flexible organisation of data layout etc. PNG offers a small number of sample formats, fixed layout and compression, and none of the higher-level TIFF features.

PNG is simple and easy to use. But "better" is subjective and by most objective measures it's inferior to TIFF.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#93

Post by DiThi »

boudewijnrempt wrote: post #91
DiThi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened with the OpenRaster format?

It's doing fine. It's the native format for MyPaint, Krita supports it, Scribus supports it. Gimp's support is outdated, but that's because Gimp gets releases so rarely.

It was kind of a rhetorical question. I looked it up after I sent the comment to confirm what you just said. I was answering to the last paragraph of the parent comment.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#94

Post by rleigh »

banachtarski wrote: post #49
cornellwright wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiff is very useful because it lets you do almost anything. A tiff image is just several arrays of numbers, you decide how many bits, signed, unsigned, float, int, etc. This is very helpful for processing which treats each pixel as a sample of the scene, such as computational microscopy or remote sensing. I've always wondered if that had something to do with why it was hosted at remotesensing.org.

See my edit. Also, when you are doing image processing, operating in scanlines is usually the least performant way of doing things, hence whey we have texture compression formats (even lossless ones) which do block encodings. TIFF has no reason for existing in my opinion.

TIFF can operate with scanlines, strips or tiles. Big images, such as 200k x 200k digital pathology slide scans, are stored in TIFF as e.g. 512x512 tiles, indivdually compressed and transparently accessible to the viewer. It is perfectly capable of dealing with images of vast sizes.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#95

Post by rleigh »

banachtarski wrote: post #77
cjhanks wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIFF supports many useful features for processing very large images. Tiled compression, storing channels in contiguous hyperplanes or on a single image plane, multiple levels of detail, custom compression codecs (lossless or lossy), sparse images, arbitrary bit widths, and permits storing arbitrary metadata with the data. Viewers of libtiff often treat it like PNG/JPEG, but good Tiff viewers can leverage this functio…

I don't doubt that you can have a library that provides all those features. All those features can exist for any lossless image format. My point is that as far as comparing image formats goes, the capabilities of the frontend library isn't a useful metric for evaluating the format itself which, in my opinion, can optimize for the following traits: 1. On-disk size 2. Compression/decompression speed 3. Access speed (fo…

TIFF is the standard format for scientific imaging. It's the container format used by well over 80% of all imaging formats out there.

It's being slowly replaced by HDF5 for some applications.

But all of the features you mention above are tunable and are in practice perfectly fine with TIFF containers.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#96

Post by rleigh »

cooper12 wrote: post #10
banachtarski wrote: post #7

Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time. edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format. It will be better than TIFF

It's commonly used as an archival format since it's not lossy like jpeg.

TIFF has selectable (and pluggable) compression. While it's standard to use deflate compression, you can also use jpeg2000 or any other algorithm of your choice if you want lossy compression.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#98

Post by BlackFingolfin »

rilut wrote: post #5

because @libtiff is already taken on Github, I think libtiff.gitlab.io is okay enough

It doesn't seem to be actively used in the past few years, though; isn't there a process one can use to claim unused github user / org names? Might be worth talking to GitHub staff about...

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#99

Post by pferde »

flukus wrote: post #89
kasey_junk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A history goes with every copy. You still need a protocol for determining the history.

> You still need a protocol for determining the history. Is this a real problem or a theoretical problem?

Such problems are always theoretical, until they suddenly become real, and you're happy that someone years ago has thought of that possibility, and left behind a way to solve them...

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#100

Post by 7952 »

banachtarski wrote: post #77
cjhanks wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIFF supports many useful features for processing very large images. Tiled compression, storing channels in contiguous hyperplanes or on a single image plane, multiple levels of detail, custom compression codecs (lossless or lossy), sparse images, arbitrary bit widths, and permits storing arbitrary metadata with the data. Viewers of libtiff often treat it like PNG/JPEG, but good Tiff viewers can leverage this functio…

I don't doubt that you can have a library that provides all those features. All those features can exist for any lossless image format. My point is that as far as comparing image formats goes, the capabilities of the frontend library isn't a useful metric for evaluating the format itself which, in my opinion, can optimize for the following traits: 1. On-disk size 2. Compression/decompression speed 3. Access speed (fo…

The big problem with highly tuned formats is that they make a lot of choices for the user. This works well when the format is used exactly as designed, but that is often not the case. With a tif I can pick exactly the compression, bit depth, color mode, tiling etc. that I need for the specific data.
Post reply on HN