2007.03.27 15:03 "[Tiff] support for 24 bit floats?", by William B Thompson

2007.03.28 16:22 "Re: [Tiff] support for 24 bit floats?", by Bob Friesenhahn

Well, I understand you completely.

Nevertheless such a middleware library is a realy missed. So I hoped for it in RGBA, and, as Bob pointed out, a bit blindly.

Someone could contribute such a middleware library to the libtiff project. Probably it should be an extra (optional) library. Development of such a library is quite challenging since it needs to handle unusual (or deep) integer bit-depths, colormaps, JPEG, OJPEG, YCbCr, subsampling, floating point, and exotics like LogLUV. Support for ICC color profiles would be handy. The biggest challenge is with how to provide a useful interface for the user since the end result should be easier than using libtiff itself. Applications smart enough to support advanced image types are likely also smart enough to efficiently retrieve these images into their own internal representation directly using libtiff interfaces.

The existing RGBA interface is quite old and since it is only 8-bit RGBA, it is not capable of satisfying today's more demanding requirements. On the flip-side, any imaging application should be able to deal with 8-bit RGBA.

Bob
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Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/