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Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time. edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least
by banachtarski 10y ago
Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time.
edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format. It will be better than TIFF
- TylerE 10y agoStill run into it with things like patents. It was the goto for a long time for scanned imagery.
- cooper12 10y agoIt's commonly used as an archival format since it's not lossy like jpeg.
- matthuggins 10y agoJPEG is commonly used in its lossy format, but there's lossless JPEG[1] as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG
- acdha 10y agoApplication support is pretty huge, though: that's what effectively turned JPEG 2000 into a niche format since the standard was patent and license encumbered for the first decade and change and the vendors didn't make interoperability a priority because they assumed the technical merits would force everyone to adopt it in the end. When you're talking about lossless, however, it's often in the context of archival storage and people get spooked after they encounter files which they have trouble opening with perfect fidelity. It's a shame since the compression technology was impressive and j2k would also have made a great progressive image format had browsers supported it.
- banachtarski 10y agoSee my edit
- rleigh 10y agoTIFF has selectable (and pluggable) compression. While it's standard to use deflate compression, you can also use jpeg2000 or any other algorithm of your choice if you want lossy compression.
- maxxxxx 10y agoTIFF is still used a lot in photography.
- umanwizard 10y agoIIRC, it's used a lot for black-and-white images without a lot of photographic detail (schematics, etc.)
- tomc1985 10y agoDigital negative storage for photography Texture data for some videogames Portable format for layered composites (a la Photoshop)
- cornellwright 10y agoTiff is very useful because it lets you do almost anything. A tiff image is just several arrays of numbers, you decide how many bits, signed, unsigned, float, int, etc. This is very helpful for processing which treats each pixel as a sample of the scene, such as computational microscopy or remote sensing. I've always wondered if that had something to do with why it was hosted at remotesensing.org.
- banachtarski 10y agoSee my edit. Also, when you are doing image processing, operating in scanlines is usually the least performant way of doing things, hence whey we have texture compression formats (even lossless ones) which do block encodings. TIFF has no reason for existing in my opinion.
- cjhanks 10y agoTIFF supports many useful features for processing very large images. Tiled compression, storing channels in contiguous hyperplanes or on a single image plane, multiple levels of detail, custom compression codecs (lossless or lossy), sparse images, arbitrary bit widths, and permits storing arbitrary metadata with the data. Viewers of libtiff often treat it like PNG/JPEG, but good Tiff viewers can leverage this functionality. Typically few batteries are included. Tiff is kind of a cross breed between structured portable formats (HDF5/NetCDF) and imagery.
- banachtarski 10y agoI don't doubt that you can have a library that provides all those features. All those features can exist for any lossless image format. My point is that as far as comparing image formats goes, the capabilities of the frontend library isn't a useful metric for evaluating the format itself which, in my opinion, can optimize for the following traits: 1. On-disk size 2. Compression/decompression speed 3. Access speed (for use in image analysis algorithms, editing, compositing, etc) 4. GPU friendliness (which operates in warps on small blocks of contiguous pixels in image space) TIFF doesn't really optimize for any of these (not even #2 since in-memory decompression can be faster than paging uncompressed data from disk)
- niccaluim 10y agoIt's popular in mapping because it can be georeferenced. https://trac.osgeo.org/geotiff/ https://trac.osgeo.org/geotiff/
- forgettableuser 10y agoTIFF is still used in the Apple ecosystems. It got a mini-rebirth recently when Apple started doing retina displays. TIFF has the ability to store multiple images, which Apple has latched onto to allow different images to be used for different resolution screens.
- draw_down 10y agoAnd yet, TIFF images still exist.
- mahyarm 10y agoTIFF is typically used as an intermediate uncompressed memory format for almost everything in images. Your png library is probably uncompressing png images into TIFF images internally. Your printer probably translates whatever is given to it into a TIFF image to print, your scanners probably use TIFF as a raw format to translate into something else. Even camera RAW images are probably using TIFF in some way or another.
- kalleboo 10y ago> Even camera RAW images are probably using TIFF in some way or another https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Negative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Negative DNG is based on the TIFF/EP standard format, and mandates significant use of metadata
- wtracy 10y agoI don't know of any other application-independent image format with good support for layers. Seriously. (Even Tiff doesn't really have good support for layers.) .PSD is tightly tied to Photoshop's internals, and .xcf is tightly tied to Gimp's internals. (The Gimp core developers explicitly recommend against using .xcf as an interchange format, even though the format has a fairly complete publicly available spec.) I've seen .gif images with multiple frames used as images with layers, but that forces every layer to have the same resolution, and of course limits you to an 8-bit color depth. Supposedly the Gimp and Krita devs are collaborating on a new interchange format that will support things like layers, but I haven't heard any news about that in years.
- DiThi 10y agoWhat happened with the OpenRaster format?
- wtracy 10y agoOh, very cool, it looks like they are making good progress! Unfortunately, it looks like there's no support for it in Photoshop, and I doubt that's likely to change.
- boudewijnrempt 10y agoIt's doing fine. It's the native format for MyPaint, Krita supports it, Scribus supports it. Gimp's support is outdated, but that's because Gimp gets releases so rarely.
- DiThi 10y agoIt was kind of a rhetorical question. I looked it up after I sent the comment to confirm what you just said. I was answering to the last paragraph of the parent comment.
- kalleboo 10y ago> Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format You don't have to call it a new format, TIFF has supported lossless compression for decades now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF#TIFF_Compression_Tag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF#TIFF_Compression_Tag DNG is also based on TIFF, so I can imagine people might use libtiff to read DNG headers.
- fdgdasfadsf 10y agoCan we have multichannel 16bit PNGs now? Can PNGs hold 3D images? If so awesome I can drop TIFF at last. Not all images are taken by cameras using 3 channels.
- dagw 10y agoCan we have multichannel 16bit PNGs now? The PNG-format supports them (up to 4 channels) however not all apps know what do with them.
- justinlardinois 10y agoNo matter how old or outdated a technology is, there will always be someone still using it somewhere. I work for a company that makes workers' compensation software. I don't know of anything in our product that actually generates new TIFFs, but we've got plenty of old ones bumping around that were either uploaded by users or imported from other systems. I end up interacting with TIFFs one way or another every other month or so.
- rleigh 10y agoTIFF is one of the most open and flexible file formats out there. PNG offers only a tiny subset of what's possible with TIFF. Note that TIFF supports multiple compression formats, lossless and lossy, multiple sample formats and sample counts, very flexible organisation of data layout etc. PNG offers a small number of sample formats, fixed layout and compression, and none of the higher-level TIFF features. PNG is simple and easy to use. But "better" is subjective and by most objective measures it's inferior to TIFF.
- rwmj 10y agoTIFF was used (probably still is) to store data from gas detectors. It wasn't called TIFF, but it was based on the format plus custom tags to store extra data and image layers. As a format it is super-flexible.
- torrent-of-ions 10y agoTIFF is like a container format. It supports lossless compression. Read up.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- aoloe 10y agoAs far as I know, PNG does not support CMYK nor spot colors. Nor clipping paths. For print, there is not really an "open" alternative that is as good as TIFF.