What do you mean by decode the pixels? If there's some image processing that needs to be done, or if you want to view, brighten, or print or something, then there are ways of doing it that will be as fast as can be. If stepping through the pixels to do your own math is what you want, then maybe something that puts the pixels in numarray / scipy / etc. form is what would work for you.
Reading a large image is going to take some time no matter what language or tool you use... How long does it take a viewer program to open and display your tiff image? How fast is the following for your image? (you'll need wxPython) import wx wx.InitAllImageHandlers() # time the following line image = wx.Image('yourfilename.tif') print "the image is %ix%i" % (image.GetWidth(), image.GetHeight()) print "the greenness pixel at 10,10 is", image.GetGreen(10,10) wxWidgets uses libtiff directly, so it will be about as fast as can be, but wxWidgets does assume that the image is RGB for most operations. The Kitware ITK (Insight Toolkit) can read lots of variations of multi-tiff images, and do tons of different kinds of manipulation on them... the only downside is its footprint and learning curve. -Jim On 6/15/05, Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Robert Kern > wrote: > > > PyPK wrote: > >> One reason why I don't want to use PIL is it seems very slow for tiff > >> images of very large sizes(2400x4800). So I am looking for a better > >> tool than does the right job faster. > > > > This isn't fast enough? > > > > In [8]: %time img2 = Image.open('foo.tiff') > > CPU times: user 0.00 s, sys: 0.01 s, total: 0.01 s > > Wall time: 0.03 > > > > In [9]: img2.size > > Out[9]: (2400, 4800) > > It's fast enough to open the file and read the meta-data. The OP wants to > decode the actual pixels. > > Ciao, > Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list