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Image file formats that didn’t make it

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Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#41

Post by ahartmetz »

kowbell wrote: post #34
ahartmetz wrote: post #16

JPEG2000 is a big one that seems to be missing. It is used in medical imaging or something, because laws? But its visual quality is worse than old JPEG, despite a PSNR advantage. Apparently, compression researchers used to think that people care about PSNR.

I've always been curious about the distinction between JPEG and JPEG2000. From what I can find online, everyone says that the visual quality is better than JPEG, it just flopped due to slow adoption. Could you elaborate on your claim that it's worse?

The technology is very different. Both translate the image into a representation where it's easier to remove "unimportant" data. JPEG is based on discrete cosine transform (DCT), JPEG2000 on wavelet transform.

Visually, where JPEG produces ringing artifacts, JPEG2000 produces blurriness. JPEG artifacts look "sparkly" and are often a reasonable replacement for the original texture, JPEG2000 artifacts look offensively dull (my opinion). I think, in theoretical speak, it's called "JPEG better preserves high frequency energy". You should be able to find side by side comparisons using your favorite image search engine.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#42

Post by whoopdedo »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #38

Can we write FLIF off, or does it still have a chance at wider adoption? I remember quite a positive reaction on release, but don't see it in the wild, unfortunately. https://flif.info/

I thought you were talking about FLIC[1] at first. Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time.

[1] https://www.compuphase.com/flic.htm

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#45

Post by kitsunesoba »

enriquto wrote: post #7

Tiff is very much not dead. It is likely one of the image formats more widely used today. Terabytes of new tiff images are prodced every hour and distributed by many remote sensing operators. It is a really flexible and robust format also. How else are you going to store a floating-point multispectral image of 8 bands and 50.000 x 50.000 pixels, arranged tile-wise for easy cropping?

For quite some time TIFF was the default format for screenshots on OS X, which was probably one of its more prominent uses by the general public. During that period it was also pretty common for developers to use TIFF for application assets like toolbar icons and splash screens.

At some point that all shifted over to PNG, but macOS support for TIFF remains good to this day.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#46

Post by TylerE »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #38

Can we write FLIF off, or does it still have a chance at wider adoption? I remember quite a positive reaction on release, but don't see it in the wild, unfortunately. https://flif.info/

"FLIF development has stopped since FLIF is superseded by FUIF and then again by JPEG XL, "

Smells very dead to me.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#48

Post by WorldMaker »

handrous wrote: post #36
NikolaNovak wrote: post #12

Hmm; Tiff is still the default universally-readable format for many lossless purposes. It also seems to be used automatically in places: e.g. in Lightroom, clicking "External Editor" sends a TIF file to the external editor and imports it back by default. I thought it was also used in some scientific/analysis scenarios as well. I thought I also saw BMP in a lot of games for some reasons (not to mention it's default ou…

I think bitmaps are often used in 2d games for level definition or various other sorts of mapping (height, for 2.5d games, et c.)

Bitmap is the easiest image file format in the world to read/write and the easiest and sometimes fastest to shoot over to any video device in the history of computing. Almost every game making tutorial going back to the 80s has "how to read/write" bitmaps usually in it somewhere.

Even 3D games will sometimes use them in a lot of odd places because it was faster/easier/took fewer cycles to include an uncompressed or simple run-length encoded bitmap than to try to store a smarter image format and need time to decompress it. (Though yes modern GPUs often support image decompression directly for certain texture file formats and that's shifted a lot.)

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#49

Post by sprash »

avmich wrote: post #37

I'd like to see a mention of FIF, fractal format from Iterative Systems, something quite different from other approaches to store images.

This format was very interesting because it was essentially "resolution independent". You could zoom in further and further and see nonsensical made up details by the fractal algorithms without getting any blurriness or interpolation artifacts.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#50

Post by Macha »

zwieback wrote: post #31
enriquto wrote: post #7

Tiff is very much not dead. It is likely one of the image formats more widely used today. Terabytes of new tiff images are prodced every hour and distributed by many remote sensing operators. It is a really flexible and robust format also. How else are you going to store a floating-point multispectral image of 8 bands and 50.000 x 50.000 pixels, arranged tile-wise for easy cropping?

That was my reaction. To be fair author says: "Of the formats listed here, TIFF is probably the one most likely to still be in wide use, but it has evolved into a more specialized format for professionals, in comparison to something like JPG."

TGA files still show up in video game textures surprisingly often
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