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Image file formats that didn’t make it

tedium.co

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Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#81

Post by duskwuff »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #10

> Today’s Tedium discusses 10 image formats that time forgot. > (list includes BMP, TIFF, TGA) I remember seeing lots of software using Quicktime PICT files, even on Windows, but I've never seen anyone break it down (Wikipedia does a bit[0]). Did everyone mostly use it as a container for JPEGs? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PICT

PICT was a really weird format. It's a stream of drawing instructions for Apple's old QuickDraw graphics layer. This could include bitmap graphics, but could also include (semi-)vector operations like drawing lines, circular arcs, polygons, or text.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#82

Post by a_e_k »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #32
sysadm1n wrote: post #4

Anecdotally, the first time I heard of TGA was in Tomb Raider. The Tomb Raider games of old had a screenshot feature that outputted TGA files of gameplay and were useful for making walk-throughs for other people (you would typically convert them to JPG when sharing on the web). And I still see BMP files being used even in modern games. Yeah: PNG is better, but BMP has its uses.

TGA is a great format for tinkering because it is very simple to code yourself to generate images and it is still widely supported.

Yes, IIRC it's about an 18 byte binary header and then BGRABGRABGRA... or BGRBGRBGR... bytes for uncompressed (there's also an RLE mode, but I never use it). The only real gotchas are the channel ordering and that the image might be flipped top-to-bottom if you're not careful.

These days though, I use tend to use the even simpler PPM format. It uses normal RGB byte ordering from top to bottom, and it's simple enough that I can code a basic writer for it from memory:

    fprintf(stream, "P6 %d %d 255\n", width, height);
    fwrite(image, 1, height * width * 3, stream);
(Often, I won't even bother opening a file to write to. I'll just emit the image to stdout and then pipe it to Image Magick for display or to convert to a compressed image format for storage.)

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#84

Post by riedel »

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 think many of those proprietary wavelet compression formats seem to be missing. I remember that at around 2000 I recompressed my images every other week after finding yet another file format that could save me some disk space. Cannot even remember their names...

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#85

Post by ksec »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #77
yboris wrote: post #70

The successor to JPEG is going to be JPEG XL (.jxl) https://jpegxl.info/

What about webp, avif, and the like?

WebP hasn't shown any significant advantage in real world test, and AVIF only wins in low bpp usage with a huge trade off on encode and decode speed. It is listed in the JPEG XL comparison table.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#86

Post by riedel »

ryandvm wrote: post #19
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…

GeoTIFF is an interesting extension of TIFF that seems to serve a niche that other image formats cannot. It doesn't have the compression of say WebP or PNG, but the fact that it can have rich geographical metadata (projection, coordinates, etc.) makes it incredibly useful for GIS applications.

Also DICOM for medical imaging is afaik based on TIFF

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#87

Post by linuxlizard »

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?

When I was doing imaging, tiff was my go-to. It's uncompressed so huge images would pop open quickly (compared to loss-less png). I could store 16-bit CMYK images in tiff which no other format (except maybe PSD) would do.

Several years ago, I attended a talk at an imaging.org conference where the presenter, an archivist from the Smithsonian, described how they used tiff in their work.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#88

Post by yboris »

ksec wrote: post #83
yboris wrote: post #70

The successor to JPEG is going to be JPEG XL (.jxl) https://jpegxl.info/

Still waiting for browser and industry wide support. So far no one seems to care much.

Not true: https://caniuse.com/?search=jxl

It's in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera behind flags - works great!

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#89

Post by linuxlizard »

godshatter wrote: post #60

Is bmp really dead? It's my go-to file format when playing around with graphic image programming (just stupid hobby stuff). It's easy to pick a format and write one out, and most everything reads it as a format that I've used, even on linux. It can be tricky reading one created by something else, but if you make assumptions based on the header sizes and the fact that you rarely run into one that not a simple 24-bit p…

You should take a look at tiff (also on their list for some reason). I used bmp in my imaging work because it's lossless and uncompressed (I got tired of waiting for 500M png files to open). But tiff is quite simple to understand and is a little more future proof than bmp.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#90

Post by MilStdJunkie »

CGM YEEEEEHAW

Ha ha ha I work in an image format so forgotten it doesn't even make the forgotten list.

Computer Graphics Metafile bitches!

My god how I loathe that thing. It's kept alive in specifications purely by the efforts of a single software company flooding all the WGs with cheerleaders. "No, it's not obsolete, SVG is just a thing used by hackers and programmers"

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