I have searched for more information around my original post. Thanks to 
Johannes and Halgeirr for their replies.

As Halgeirr says, TIFF is the only real way to save lossless image 
files. As a scientist I have become very familiar with data integrity 
and images to the point where my work only allowed monochrome images 
which were made with narrow bandpass filters to select just a few 
wavelengths. You can not get such accuracy with anything that processes 
an image and provides sRGB colour. You probably can not get such 
accuracy with any consumer camera at all!

As a normal photographer I do require exif-meta data as a way of putting 
information with my images.

I tried to find a workaround to my problem. When I workup images on a 
Windows box the images can be picked up by any Linux software without 
problem. However, the reverse was not the case with the exception of 
Adobe software. Adobe are clearly sticking to their own tiff 
specification that any tiff file must be readable by any tiff based 
software.

Whilst doing some other work I thought about Image Magick. Sure enough, 
"convert *.tiff -endian LSB *.tiff" will churn, very slowly, through a 
directory of DarkTable sixteen bit tiff files and make them Windows 
software readable. Unfortunately this process destroys most of the 
exif-meta data. Also the MM tab at the start of the file remains and is 
not changed to II. (Tiff files can be loaded in any text editor to see 
this.) This means that IM converted files have to be stored separately 
in a different archive.

I am going to guess that the real problem is Microsoft yet again. Yet 
again, it would be great if Linux could handle this image situation. My 
Pentax dng or pef files take on a life and quality that I have never 
seen before using Darktable and Amaze. What's more is that this can be 
done from a batch that contains all sorts of exposure settings. The auto 
settings work very well.

Laurence







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