What about those other non-TIFF, non-JPG file formats? Anyone actually use 'em? And what for?

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Benjamin Marks

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I was converting a bunch of Olympus PNG [Edit/Correction: ORF] files (their proprietary RAW format, which is really a TIFF file, as far as I understand it, which is not much) to JPG for sending to a friend today and I started looking at the laundry list of options that Photoshop gives one when one enters the murky waters of "Save As." IFF format? ScitexCT? Targa? These are probably industry specific file formats that have particular advantages when used in those specialty applications.

I have never used anything other than PSD, TIFF, and JPG myself, and occasionally BMP or PNG. And really TIFF and JPG do 99% of the work for me. I used to use PSD when I was brrrrraaaaaand new to Photoshop, but the files were huge and didn't offer someone with my meager skills any obvious advantages.

How about it? Any reason to use what I consider the "exotic" file formats? Inquiring minds. . . and all of that.

[Edit: Zeitz pointed out below that Olympus files are ORF, not "PNG" as I said above. Thanks for the correction.]
 
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PNG is essential if you're doing anything that involves text (think: graphics for web). JPG causes artefacts around text, PNG doesn't. PNG also supports transparent backgrounds, which is useful from time to time.

On the other hand, I've not had a single use for BMP since 1995 or 1996.
 
For the few times I don't edit from RAW files, I would absolutely be using HEIC over JPEG if I had any cameras that shot it. Smaller file sizes, fewer compression artifacts, etc. Superior to JPEG in every way.
 
If I get a photo from the web, it is always saved in JPEG, but I then open it and re-save it as a windows bitmap (bmp), then if I have to faff about with the pic I do it to the bmp as this is a lossless file format, unlike jpeg. Depending on what needs doing I may have to use two different programs (both free on magazine covers in about 2001), but neither does everything I want in the way I want.

Personally, I don't understand why digital cameras don't use bmp files, but I presume there are good reasons.
 
seany65 said:
If I get a photo from the web, it is always saved in JPEG, but I then open it and re-save it as a windows bitmap (bmp), then if I have to faff about with the pic I do it to the bmp as this is a lossless file format, unlike jpeg. Depending on what needs doing I may have to use two different programs (both free on magazine covers in about 2001), but neither does everything I want in the way I want.

Personally, I don't understand why digital cameras don't use bmp files, but I presume there are good reasons.
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BMP files are traditionally uncompressed data (although compression is an option, but an expensive one for in-camera use due to the processing requirements involved) and quickly consumed all storage in the cameras. It was developed by Microsoft Corporation and used primarily on Windows and OS/2 systems; everyone else had to license the spec from Microsoft. So it didn't get a wide base of use because of the licensing costs and the fact of its necessitating a Microsoft license for distribution.

JPEG (a scalable file storage and compression algorithm developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Guild about 1992 including Kodak and other big players in the photographic industry) had/has much more favorable licensing arrangements and is essentially licensed from a neutral non-player in the production of photographic equipment.

HEIF is a much later (2013) algorithm with similar neutral development bases to JPEG, but with both 8 and 10 bit encoding possibilities, and less loss/more efficient storage capabilities. It has not yet seen full adoption across the board, but is progressing nicely and should sometime soon replace JPEG as the new standard.

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Benjamin Marks said:
(their proprietary RAW format, which is really a TIFF file
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A raw file is not an image. It is the data directly from the sensor, along with metadata about the camera and perhaps some post processing information. This is more true of DNG files which can save all post processing in the DNG file. A raw file cannot be displayed on any device without a separate raw converter. There is one in your camera so that an image can be displayed on its screen even when you are only saving raw. TIFF, as its name says, is a Tagged Image File Format. It is not raw. TIFF is now owned by Adobe although Adobe did not create it. A close equivalent to TIFF is PSD (Photo Shop Document). Both can save the image processing steps within the image file.
seany65 said:
If I get a photo from the web, it is always saved in JPEG
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Images from the web are often saved in JPEG or PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format these days. PNG replaced Bitmaps for the Web. It does not good to resave in an uncompressed BMP because PNG is already compressed.
Benjamin Marks said:
I was converting a bunch of Olympus PNG files (their proprietary RAW format, which is really a TIFF file, as far as I understand it,
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Olympus' raw format is ORF as best as I can tell. Olympus owns ORF so it can be proprietary. As I stated, TIFF is owned by Adobe; so if an Olympus file is really TIFF, it cannot be proprietary.
 
Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) is a container type file format. You can stuff almost anything into a TIFF file, and it is the basis file type of *most* raw files as a result, customized for each manufacturers'/cameras' needs. Adobe owns the stewardship of TIFF file format now and charges a very small licensing fee for its use and distribution, for whomsoever wants to use it.

I don't know that ORF (Olympus Raw Format) is entirely proprietary with respect to the base file format. It is, however, proprietary with respect to the contents and their organization.

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zeitz said:
Olympus' raw format is ORF as best as I can tell. Olympus owns ORF so it can be proprietary. As I stated, TIFF is owned by Adobe; so if an Olympus file is really TIFF, it cannot be proprietary.
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Thanks for that. Of course it is, I made the correction above. Thanks for pointing out my error.
 
A lot of these came from the early days of desktop publishing, before the computer graphics world settled into a few standardized file types. Scitex was a manufacturer of scanners, presses, and imagesetters used in the printing industry. EPS files were used for vector-graphics files before PDF format came into wide use. Those are just a couple of examples.

Today, the only really useful file formats are JPEGs (for online photos), TIFFs (for printing and archiving of high-resolution photos), GIFs (web graphics), PNG (web graphics, largely superseding GIFs for those uses), various RAW file formats used by camera makers for their RAW files, and PDFs (used for vector graphics, final desktop publishing files sent to the print shop, and for putting documents on the web).
 
PhotoShop Document (PSD) is important in that it is Adobe's native file format for PhotoShop... ;) Kinda self reflexive? But it's "specialness" has been pretty much superceded in the past decade and some because a file saved in 16-bit TIFF from PhotoShop contains *all* the same information as PSD files do.

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santino said:
What happened to jpeg2000? It was a promesing format.
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JPEG2000 format incorporated a lossless addition to JPEG format's scalability and compression. But it just didn't catch on or become very universal, possibly because it didn't expand JPEG format's bit depth and could not really do much different. HEIF has become the successor to JPEG instead, and does everything JPEG2000 can do while providing more.

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Retro-Grouch said:
How do you guys keep track of all this? I'm still getting over the demise of Kodachrome...
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I don't keep track of it ... I just remember what I read. Various file formats have various histories to them, and I find the histories interesting. :)

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I started with Targa-format images back in about 1991 with Aldus PhotoStyler (an early competitor to PhotoShop) in second-year undergrad and that seemed to be our default file format at the time. We had a slide scanner at the school (which took forever to scan a single slide) and we saved them as Targas. I think I made the switch to TIFFS and JPEGS in about 1995 when I was in grad school. Haven’t touched a Targa file since, but it would be fun to work with one again for old-time sake.
 
zeitz, I understand that jpegs are compressed (I didn't know png's were), but re-saving as a bmp seems to increase the file size, plus I still have the original jpeg should something go wrong with the bmp while I'm fiddling with it.
 
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