2005.11.07 19:18 "Re: [Tiff] How located pixels with BitsPerSample not bound to byte?", by Joris Van Damme

I must admit to being dubious about this claim, and I believe that Joris is as well. But if Adobe Photoshop CS2 does it, by-golly it must be right!

You misunderstood my feelings about byteswapping 24bit data...

All by itself, I do think the convention to byteswap this is unfortunate, you got that right.

However, I feel it is much more important that we have a person or organisation with authority, that jumps in when needed, and provides standardized conventions for us. I mean, there is no 'right' or 'wrong' (even if there is 'fortunate' and 'maybe less fortunate'), there is only 'convention', as in 'specification', or, much worse, the lack of it.

This is not the only issue where recently we discovered what I believe is a 'hole' in the specification and needed a standardizing, descision making organization. The other issue was whether or not to byteswap image data that is not bytealigned (like when samples per pixel is for example [3, 16, 7], for chunky planarconfiguration, which is not possible in LibTiff, but legite in TIFF, and makes that the second channel is of byteswapping width, but usually not byte aligned). In this case too, Chris jumped in and made the descision we needed.

So, right, I don't think this particular choice he made is very pleasing. But, the fact that he's here to make choices is what matters most to me. Therefore, I don't wish to argue with Chris about this issue, and I do wish we would just thank him and not doubt him. We need him, he's the spec's representative amongst us mortals.

Joris Van Damme
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