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

Image file formats that didn’t make it

tedium.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 210 posts

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#191

Post by infogulch »

mark-r wrote: post #73
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?

I think all the RAW formats generated by digital cameras are really just slightly customized TIFFs.

Really? Slightly customized in what way? Would a tiff reader be able to decode them?

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#192

Post by dhosek »

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?

I remember dealing with massive (for the time) TIFF files back in the 90s. I had some full page B/W scans at 1200 dpi which, converted into PostScript turned out to be virtually impossible to convey to my service bureau for outputting to film. I ended up having to send camera ready copy to the printers for them to photograph and strip into the plates in order to meet my press deadline. CD-R was still something in the future and I ended up having to support about 3 or 4 removable media drives to deal with incoming files from my authors.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#193

Post by kalleboo »

giantrobot wrote: post #105
lostgame wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I distinctly recall installing QuickTime to view some VRML stuff in the mid/late 90's.

QuickTime's QTVR wasn't the same as VRML. While VRML was a fully 3D world/object, QTVR was pre-rendered scenes with custom navigation controls. There was an "object" view which was basically a bunch of still images of an object from different angles. The cursor moved a virtual camera that just displayed the still frame for the appropriate angle. The "panorama" view was a panoramic image mapped to view angles from a c…

There was also QuickDraw 3D (not QuickTime, and not cross-platform), Apple's 3D graphics API, which used actual 3D rendered objects.

Classic MacOS had pretty well-integrated support for QuickDraw 3D Metafiles, they could be dragged and dropped, you could embed 3D objects into a word processing document or presentation or something and manipulate and explore them in there.

Kind of mirrors what Apple is doing with USDZ these days (you can send a USDZ model in iMessage and the recipient can manipulate it right there in chat)

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#194

Post by hanche »

infogulch wrote: post #191
mark-r wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think all the RAW formats generated by digital cameras are really just slightly customized TIFFs.

Really? Slightly customized in what way? Would a tiff reader be able to decode them?

As far as I’m aware, all the tags (the T in TIFF) are in standard TIFF format. But your generic TIFF reader might haves some trouble getting the image data (I.e., the pixels).

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#195

Post by hanche »

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?

Scanners often have TIFF or multipage TIFF as one of their delivery formats.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#196

Post by yread »

sairahul82 wrote: post #182
riedel wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also DICOM for medical imaging is afaik based on TIFF

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

tiff is also just a container it can contain lz compressed data or with some lossy compression

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#197

Post by sprash »

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #127
sprash wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This format was very interesting because it was essentially "resolution independent" When I read that, I thought it is because it is a vector type. Usually "resolution independent" images, from my understanding, are commonly vector type since it can scale infinitely like SVG. However, I couldn't find information online whatever .FIF is a raster or vector type. I saw one that said it shares similarly to vector image…

Your link contains is a nice article [1] how the resolution independent "raster type" looks like when zooming in including ancient Windows software to try it yourself. Sadly wine crashes when I try to start it.

1.: http://users.senet.com.au/~mjbone/Fractals.html

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#199

Post by madmoose »

a_e_k wrote: post #82
mytailorisrich wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

PPM P6 is also what I use all the time - I usually have to convert from paletted format to RGB first.

A PPM paletted format would save me a lot of space.

The built-in support for PPM in Preview on Mac OS X makes it extremely useful.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#200

Post by ihattendorf »

linuxlizard wrote: post #87
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.

TIFF also supports optional compression (usually LZW or Zip).
Post reply on HN