Your favourite image format

[Rex_Mundi_Incarnit]

What is your favourite image format? The one you use the most and love the most. Lets bring on a poll! :cool: (It's multiple choice)

I'd go ultimately for jpg. I havent really tried out jpg2000 yet because it's still relatively new and many programmes might not understand it but sounds attractive because it is lossless. In Paint Shop Pro i also use its own format, pspimage, so i can keep layers intact.

[Tokelil]

Well it really depends on what you gonna use it for IMO. Most of the formats have their use.

- GIF if you need lossless, transparency, low color count.
- JPG if your have a photo and lossless isn't requered and small size is prefered.
- PNG if you need lossless and alpha blending
- PSD, pspimages if you need to keep the layers... Unfortunally there is no standard where to layered images to my knowledge.
- PS,wmf if you need a vector format...

and so on... It comes down to your requerements and what you use them for. Ofc. GIF shouldn't be used for photos.

About JPEG 2000. I dont think this format will ever get its break through. It has too little advantages over jpg when lossy and too little over png when going lossless. Though technically it is interresting and would probably be my format of choise for lossless photo compression if the support was better.

Anyway, I voted PNG as that is the format I use the most. Lossless, alpha blending and good compression rates when using images with "big" once colored areas.

[Qaz]

Well it really depends on what you gonna use it for IMO. Most of the formats have their use.

- GIF if you need lossless, transparency, low color count.
- JPG if your have a photo and lossless isn't requered and small size is prefered.
- PNG if you need lossless and alpha blending
- PSD, pspimages if you need to keep the layers... Unfortunally there is no standard where to layered images to my knowledge.
- PS,wmf if you need a vector format...

and so on... It comes down to your requerements and what you use them for. Ofc. GIF shouldn't be used for photos.
What he said.

For me, jpg for photos and png for the rest.

[acushla]

Well it really depends on what you gonna use it for IMO. Most of the formats have their use.

GIF if you need lossless, transparency, low color count.

It comes down to your requirements and what you use them for. Ofc. GIF shouldn't be used for photos.

Errr...perhaps in Denmark GIF files aren't used for photographs...but here in North America GIF are used almost exclusively when your photos are being published.

Also used for the faster exchange of graphics over modem lines and is also widely used in Web publishing.

[Tokelil]

Well that's pretty stupid, since GIF only supports a 8 bit color index. I can't think of a real life scenario photo that doesn't have more than 256 different colors. (Even a shot in the dark will probably have more colors)

[Todd The Kiwi]

i've recently started using .PNG for everything
it looks better for the size [toke mentioned alpha blending, maybe that's why?]

i'm going to keep a copy of this handy, i can never remember the limits :P

[idefiXX]

PSD and GIF for my websites
PNG (90%) and JPG (10%) for the rest

[Antman]

Format is application dependent. By application, I mean the task at hand. I am looking forward to Windows Media Photo.

[acushla]

Well that's pretty stupid, since GIF only supports a 8 bit color index. I can't think of a real life scenario photo that doesn't have more than 256 different colors. (Even a shot in the dark will probably have more colors)Opps...my excuse is that I've been up for a couple of days now.

TIFF...the correct answer is TIFF.

At least I got part of it right...IF.

Me dumb.

[Solon]

Now I don't feel so stupid.

Thanks Acushla!

hehe :silly:

[Toe]

I assume we're only talking about raster formats? :ditsy:

PNG is my overall favorite format, except for one glaring weakness: lack of support for EXIF/IPTC metadata. That really hurts it as an archival format.

TIFF wouldn't be a bad choice if there weren't so many different, sometimes incompatible versions/implementations of it, and it had better web support.

GIF, only reason I see to use it at this point is for simple animated GIFs on the web. For every other purpose there's better choices.

[acushla]

TIFF wouldn't be a bad choice if there weren't so many different, sometimes incompatible versions/implementations of it, and it had better web support.

I feel you may be unnecessary hard on TIFF, especially your comment about the incompatible versions/implementations of it. TIFF was specifically designed to alleviate problems associated with fixed file formats and to become the industry standard for image-file exchange.

A key point to remember is that, once open, the TIFF file performs equally well with IBM PC, APPLE Macintosh and UNIX, a definite advantage when the image is passing through several directors and editors.

Like everything in life, there is a price to be paid for all the problems TIFF solves. In order to achieve that level of refinement the file structure becomes complex and requires more code to manage it than do most other maga-file formats. However, since I am only concerned with image processing, this should not be an issue.

Every major scanner manufacturer and every desktop publishing program supports TIFF and there are any number of translator programs that translate other image-file formats to the TIFF format.

As a photographer, everything I read or discover on any given legitimate Photo site tells me that, for serious work, TIFF is the ONLY way to go.

[rorythedog]

I looked hard but there seems to be no 'nude' option in this poll :cry: :silly:

[Rex_Mundi_Incarnit]

I looked hard but there seems to be no 'nude' option in this poll :cry: :silly:

Is raw not close enough? ;)

I totally dont like TIF. I have only bad experiences with it. Corrupted images and stuff. Windows doesnt seem to like TIF either :(

I still remember the days of tga and pcx. Those image formats are pretty dead now I suppose.

[acushla]

I totally don't like TIF. I have only bad experiences with it. Corrupted images and stuff. Windows doesn't seem to like TIF either :(


Seriously...can you be more specific? Corrupted file? Yours or...

I've been shooting RAW files with my CANON 20D for over two years now and then I convert them into TIFF. Have never had a problem.

[Rex_Mundi_Incarnit]

Seriously...can you be more specific? Corrupted file? Yours or...


Well for example, two days ago I used the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) to make some pictures of my samples at the micrometre scale (1 micron = 10^-6 metre). They were saved as uncompressed tif files and I had them send home via email. At home i downloaded them and they all showed up to be corrupted. Skewed images, missing bits, error messages, etc. The crazy thing is that i tried several paint programmes to view them (PS, PSP, Gimp, MS Office picture manager, etc) and they showed up different with every programme. Luckily they were not corrupted to start with, but uploading them seemed to have fucked them up. Lastly, Windows preview doesnt show tif at all. No I dont think MS and I like tif very much ;)

[Toe]

Speaking of MS, did you guys hear about Windows Media Photo (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/25/windows_media_photo/)?

[Tokelil]

Interresting. Microsofts seems to really push the file formats as we know them these days.
I don't know that much about jpg, but from the Windows Media Photo specs paper, it sounds like a good format for a broad range of products. It'll properly not be the most compact image format ever, but that's not the goal it seems. Interresting that the contained seems to be TIFF compatible as well.

[madjo]

missing option: XCF (Gimp's native format)

oh and did anyone else here this? The JPEG patent is being debated by the US Patent Office. They have already tossed out some parts of the whole patent, and apparently it is up for repeal.

[acushla]

Well for example, two days ago I used the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) to make some pictures of my samples... I think I found the source of your problem...What Scanning Electron Microscope were you using? There is a known compatibility problem between SEM's and TIF files.:foureyes: :confused: :silly:

PS Careful with the language...this is a family forum. Consider yourself warned once.:silly:

[acushla]

Speaking of MS, did you guys hear about Windows Media Photo (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/25/windows_media_photo/)?I hadn't heard anything about this...which is half the reason I belong to a forum of this nature...so I will hear about those items that are worthy...

This seems to be a good idea, I guess, if you have a phone as your camera. The article itself seems to dispel any thought of this affecting the Professional market...so for myself as a Pro shooter, who does not nor will not ever own another 'cell' phone...err...I mean Phone/Camera, as long as I live, it only makes for interesting reading.

[Toe]

The article itself seems to dispel any thought of this affecting the Professional market Huh? That's not the impression I got from it. 32bit per channel support, n-channel support (meaning the image can be natively stored in CMYK or any other color format without conversion to RGB), lossless compression, explicit metadata support, embeded ICC profiles - sounds like a pretty damn good pro format to me!

Like the article said, though, licensing is going to be THE issue with it. They'd definately need to get Adobe on board, and as many digital camera makers as possible. Ideally, small-time image browsers and editors and things like Mozilla could use it too.

For now, I'm marking myself as cautiously optimistic.

[acushla]

Huh? That's not the impression I got from it...

For now, I'm marking myself as cautiously optimistic.
My impressions were arrived at from several angles. The way this reads is that the intention is to offer a viable and better alternative to JPEG and JPEG 2000. Which, as we know, is a long way from a RAW file.

I read this...Original file size is unlikely to be a major issue for photo professionals, who can now avail themselves of the (big, big uncompressed file) .dng format for manipulation on Photoshop CS2, for example. A "viable compression format" would, though, be something of interest to those subsequently trying to squeeze quality out of plausible file size. Wells described jpeg as "unusable for professional photographers".

I reread the article this time including the 'Further Info' section at the end. Now I see that indeed we are talking 'lossless' as you point out...which changes everything.

Definitely a story worth following.

[Tokelil]

Besides being lossless, it has very fast decompression (and apparently also encoding) with just 3 MADD and 7 ADD/Shift operations, which means you can manipulate big images in real time. (Would probably be quite easy to write a pixelshader to do it as well!) Which as I see it, has to be a big + to profs as well.