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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

#181

Post by willis936 »

NL807 wrote: post #152
klodolph wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably because of how simple the format can be, with basically a header and footer tacked on to some RGBA data. Surprisingly, with PNG, the deflate compression can slow you down, depending on what you are doing with the data. Saving a little bit of IO when you're accessing local data can turn out to be a losing proposition. TGA makes it easier to just shove pixels around, from program to program. TGA has all…

Not only that, but you can use TGA to write 16-bits per channel, which is very useful for raw data, or linear RGB colour spaces.

Does bitmap not tick all of these boxes?

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#182

Post by sairahul82 »

riedel wrote: post #86
ryandvm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

DICOM is a container. It can contain any format including jpeg, tiff, png etc.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#183

Post by willis936 »

whoopdedo wrote: post #22

I wish the author provided more information about the strangeness of some of these formats and why they're now obsolete. PCX being one of the oddest because it's ordered by planes. So the red, green, and blue components are split. What this list is missing is WMF/EMF which were basically direct serializations of Windows drawing primitives. > BMP files are usually not compressed and, therefore, are not well suited for…

EMF is still widely used. Word no longer imports .eps files as of about 4 years ago, so .emf is the next best option when generating plots in MATLAB or python. PDF embedding would be a dream, but that really doesn't work. svg is also reasonable, but word handles emf better.

I use LaTeX for my personal stuff, but employers don't touch such things with 20 foot poles.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#185

Post by a_lost_needle »

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…

They are very much still in use in at least one government.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#186

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

jandrese wrote: post #128
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #126

Does anyone know of a method for extracting images from the FlashPix (.fpx) format. I think user-friendly support for the format was lost when Kodak went bankrupt. However is the format itself overly-complicated.

ImageMagick may have support: https://github.com/ImageMagick/libfpx

Thank you!

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#187

Post by kbelder »

zwieback wrote: post #28

Another one that didn't make it: writing a packed binary file where the first two shorts are the width and height and then just 8 bit grayscale values. That was my favorite way to serialize images but I never had the foresight to add enough header or versioning info to make it backward compatible. Now after 30+ years of programming the first thing I add to any homebrew file format is enough info to make it extensible…

Just store the width. You'll know the height when you're done drawing it, and it saves you two bytes.

You never get over learning to program on a system with 3.5k ram.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#188

Post by Impossible »

Macha wrote: post #50
zwieback wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When I worked on Call of Duty (~7 years ago) almost all of our source images were TGA. The runtime format that almost all games use are various block compressed formats (BC7, ASTC, etc) and usually these are grouped in some kind of package/archive format (although engines are moving away from that in order to stream at the asset level) and lz4 compressed on disk.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#189

Post by iliketrains »

I find TGA very useful when in need of image output and without easy access to a proper image lib. TGAs are trivial to output just by writing RGB values to a file with a simple header, no encoder needed.

I am so glad that many image viewers/editors still load TGA, my computer has gigabytes of them!

Spec here: http://www.paulbourke.net/dataformats/tga/

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#190

Post by dhosek »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #45
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.

Hmm, I don't remember TIFF for screen shots. It was PDF (perhaps PDF-wrapped TIFF?) ca 2002–4 which is not too long after the first usable OS X.
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