I've always stored my images as TIFF files, probably because I use Quark Xpress for a lot of things, and Quark has always supported TIFF. (I'm a Mac user of course.) Out of habit I store all my hi-res scans as tiffs and make my color prints from tiffs. I don't have any particular reason for doing so, but it has always worked well for me. Paul
Doug Franklin wrote: > > On Sun, 28 Oct 2001 22:08:37 +1300, David A. Mann wrote: > > > The downside of using TIFF is that many if not most TIFF readers don't > > support the standard fully (which you touched on in your post). This is fine if > > you don't use too many of the features but sometimes you'll come across an > > oddball file that you can't load in some programs. > > TIFF is a very flexible, capable, and, thus, complex file format. It > was specifically designed to be able to represent "any" digital image. > It supports just about any compression type out there. It supports > color depths from one bit per pixel to 65,536 bits per color per pixel > (IIRC). It supports images where the resolution is different in one > direction than the other. It supports RGB color encoding, two or three > varieties of CMYK color encoding, and other color encodings only useful > to very small industrial niches. It supports notes and other textual > annotations. It's the proverbial "everything and the kitchen sink" > standard. > > That's great if you have some wacky image data to store or exchange. > That is, it's great if you can find a TIFF creator/reader that supports > the specific sort of wackiness you're dealing with. It also means, > though, that _very_ few creators/readers support the whole spec, or > even a large fraction of it. And it means that there are lots of buggy > creators and readers out there. PhotoShop probably does as well as > just about any of them on PCs (I've never done specific tests) but I > doubt it supports all of the spec (there's some really strange stuff in > there, like compression and image formats for early fax images). > > As someone who's written TIFF creators and readers, writing one that's > full function and fully supports the entire TIFF spec is a daunting > task. Making it able to accurately render the images to a display > surface (monitor, printer, etc.) is even more daunting, because TIFF > supports a lot of stuff that you just can't reasonably do unless the > display surface and the underlying system are built to handle it. > > TTYL, DougF > - > This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, > go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to > visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org . - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
