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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

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."

chriscjcj 5y ago
TIFFs are uncompressed or compressed with zip or lzw which is lossless. JPEGs are lossy and can't possibly be lossless. Pitting one as an alternative to the other is apples an oranges. When I read that sentence you quoted, I figured that the author is either lacking knowledge on the topic they're blogging about or they are trolling.
- ElectricalUnion 5y ago
  > JPEGs are lossy and can't possibly be lossless. https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/ https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    File formats exist that have JPEG in the name, that have certain features JPEG does not, and that cannot be decoded by all of these programs that can decode JPEG files. A JPEG XL file, for all intents and purposes, is not a JPEG file. JPEG is a file format from decades ago. Obviously it’s possible to do better today. But it’s not possible to just invent a new format and have it as widely usable as JPEG. PNG did this with GIF but really only because GIF was seriously hobbled by software patents. It’s doubtful the millions of colors and alpha transparency would have won over compatibility otherwise.
- poizan42 5y ago
  TIFF is more like a container format that can contain a ton of different formats including many lossy formats. That also includes not just one but two different ways of embedding JPEG data (Compression 6 vs 7). See e.g. https://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/tifftags/compression.html https://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/tifftags/compressio...
Macha 5y ago
TGA files still show up in video game textures surprisingly often
- klodolph 5y ago
  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 sorts of weird options which you can ignore, but with PNG, compression is mandatory.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    I believe PNG supports uncompressed files, usually with a compression level = 0.
    - klodolph 5y ago
      The data is still a Deflate stream, it's just that the deflate stream will be a series of literal blocks. The idea behind "uncompressed" is that you can just copy the data into memory, and level = 0 does not achieve that (you still have to decode the deflate stream).
      - jfrunyon 5y ago
        ... what decoding needs to be done on a series of literal blocks?
  - NL807 5y ago
    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.
    - willis936 5y ago

chriscjcj 5y ago

TIFFs are uncompressed or compressed with zip or lzw which is lossless. JPEGs are lossy and can't possibly be lossless. Pitting one as an alternative to the other is apples an oranges. When I read that sentence you quoted, I figured that the author is either lacking knowledge on the topic they're blogging about or they are trolling.

ElectricalUnion 5y ago
> JPEGs are lossy and can't possibly be lossless. https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/ https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  File formats exist that have JPEG in the name, that have certain features JPEG does not, and that cannot be decoded by all of these programs that can decode JPEG files. A JPEG XL file, for all intents and purposes, is not a JPEG file. JPEG is a file format from decades ago. Obviously it’s possible to do better today. But it’s not possible to just invent a new format and have it as widely usable as JPEG. PNG did this with GIF but really only because GIF was seriously hobbled by software patents. It’s doubtful the millions of colors and alpha transparency would have won over compatibility otherwise.
poizan42 5y ago
TIFF is more like a container format that can contain a ton of different formats including many lossy formats. That also includes not just one but two different ways of embedding JPEG data (Compression 6 vs 7). See e.g. https://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/tifftags/compression.html https://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/tifftags/compressio...

Macha 5y ago

TGA files still show up in video game textures surprisingly often

klodolph 5y ago
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 sorts of weird options which you can ignore, but with PNG, compression is mandatory.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  I believe PNG supports uncompressed files, usually with a compression level = 0.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    The data is still a Deflate stream, it's just that the deflate stream will be a series of literal blocks. The idea behind "uncompressed" is that you can just copy the data into memory, and level = 0 does not achieve that (you still have to decode the deflate stream).
    - jfrunyon 5y ago
      ... what decoding needs to be done on a series of literal blocks?
- NL807 5y ago
  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.
  - willis936 5y ago