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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

#131

Post by jandrese »

duskwuff wrote: post #81
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.

Of course this means making a third party reader means re-implementing QuickDraw and probably getting some nastygrams from Apple's lawyers.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#132

Post by aidenn0 »

zokier wrote: post #115
kowbell wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Thanks to the power of internet we do not need to speculate; here is a comparison between image formats, JPEG2000 being represented by "OPENJPEG": https://wyohknott.github.io/image-formats-comparison/#sking*... Subjectively I think JPEG2000 is better across the different images, at least at this "medium" size preset.

I should also point out that mozjpeg is considerably better than jpeg compressors that were around when JPEG2000 was introduced. I don't know if openjpeg is similarly improved.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#133

Post by jandrese »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #75

Found VRML in there unexpected. But was expecting MNG but didn't find it. Interesting history with that one, a few browsers implemented it but then removed it. Leading to a lot of geek angst. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphic...

I was never sure why MNG failed so spectacularly. Eventually it had to be replaced by full up H.264 videos and a lot of places are still using old fashioned animated GIFs because firing up a full fat video codec for a 32x16 animation with a dozen frames is silly.

Was it really just the lack of interest from browser makers preventing people from using it?

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#134

Post by NelsonMinar »

iscrewyou wrote: post #25
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?

Geo-tiffs are the go to standard in GIS integration of any property map. Photoshop works really well with tiffs.

Was going to say the same thing; GeoTIFFs are common. But they are a "specialist" format in the way the article is talking about.

Why is GeoPNG not a thing? PNG is based on TIFF's design with various chunks allowing all sorts of metadata storage. It'd be pretty easy to translate GeoTIFF's GIS stuff into PNG. Has that been done?

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#135

Post by ahartmetz »

zokier wrote: post #115
kowbell wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Thanks to the power of internet we do not need to speculate; here is a comparison between image formats, JPEG2000 being represented by "OPENJPEG": https://wyohknott.github.io/image-formats-comparison/#sking*... Subjectively I think JPEG2000 is better across the different images, at least at this "medium" size preset.

IMO, they are closer than in other comparisons except you can still see some of the usual problems: e.g. in the "Cecret [sic] Lake" image on Medium: with JPEG there is a hint of ripple on the lake and most of the raggedness of the edges of the clouds is still there. With JPEG2000, the reflections on the lake turn into blotches and clouds have soft edges, even missing some large and obvious details. For some reason, it's quite disturbing to me. OTOH, JPEG2000 does a surprisingly very good job on the bushes. Maybe JPEG2000 could be actually good by allocating a little more bitrate to low contrast areas.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#136

Post by jug »

ksec wrote: post #96
yboris wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true: https://caniuse.com/?search=jxl It's in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera behind flags - works great!

It is behind a flag, with no time table when it will be officially supported. And no company ( apart from Facebook ) came up and said we will use it as long as browser supports it. Most are still in the AVIF camp.

It’s unfortunate they spent time to get AVIF implemented right before JPEG XL. JXL is a more complete image format rather than a keyframe of AV1 video. Some media format cruft is amounting in web browsers but JXL of all things should ironically really be in there.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#137

Post by jandrese »

giantrobot wrote: post #102
drdeadringer wrote: post #57

In a summer tech program for pre-college high school tech-interested//inclined students, my group of three created four different VRML world-spaces. We each made our own, and I made the "gateway" world-space where you would enter a Parthenon-like structure with three hyperlink objects inside which you could click on to travel to each of the other places. Each place had a similar hyperlink object to get back to the Pa…

VRML Sourcebook [0]. I did a similar little project in VRML. I took the general organization of my homepage and VRMLized it. Authoring it was such a pain in the ass. I loved the concepts behind VRML, and still do. Unfortunately all of the implementations around it were terrible. When it was in vogue PCs weren't powerful enough to handle anything but the most trivial models. Dial-up was entirely insufficient to delive…

I remember the VRML player having some weird skewmorphic navigation widget that was incredibly clunky to use. You had to use the mouse to turn virtual wheels to adjust your speed or something, all laid out on a horizontal tube thing at the bottom of the screen.

And this was years after Doom and other 3D shooters introduced wasd movement.

VRMLs biggest problem was that it was just way ahead of its time. Everybody who tried it agreed that 90s PC hardware just wasn't ready for VR, and dialup modems were never going to be adequate. Unfortunately almost everything that has come up to replace it has been proprietary and usually monetized. We've lost that sense of "anybody in the community can be a creator" that defined the early web. It was too hard to monetize.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#138

Post by NelsonMinar »

I was kind of hoping to see PNM referenced here. That's the very simple format that comes in PBM, PGM, and PPM files made popular by Jef Poskanzer's PBMPlus (and later, NetPBM).

The core insight was great: have one generic lossless simple raster format and make lots of command line image processing tools for it. Then have a bunch of converters. For many years I got a lot of work out of things like xpmtoppm icon.xpm | pnmscale 3 | ppmtogif > icon-big.gif. It helped the format was so simple you could easily create images in C code, too. (These days we use Imagemagick or derivates instead.)

One interesting thing about PNM is very few images were ever stored in that format itself. It was intended mostly as an intermediate format for process.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#139

Post by interroboink »

bluedino wrote: post #39

PCX! It's such a simple format. I remember reading about it as a kid, punching in some code to read the header, then the data, then the palette, having an image appear before my eyes. Fixing the bugs in my code made the image appear correct, what a great intro to debugging and seeing the results. It seemed like magic at the time. Taking this binary data that was gibberish when looking at it with EDIT.COM and making i…

Right there with you (:

I wrote a PCX reader in QBasic. I can still remember seeing that image of a red rose finally appear in all it its 320x200 pixelated glory.

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