If the input file format had 3 obvious r g b channels and then 3 which were not 
related to color (z, alpha, obj-id) then it seems like keeping the r g b 
channels when going to JPEG is in the spirit of "do the obvious thing".

If it's a 6-channel color thing then it's unlikely any 3 channels make sense.

Does the input format have no information like channel names?

--jono --mobile--

> On Feb 7, 2015, at 4:35 PM, Larry Gritz <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On one hand, we don't want to do operations that are not supported in the 
> output format, thereby resulting in significant loss of data. On the other 
> hand, we can't be too trigger-happy with the errors, or it would be 
> impossible to get anything done. So when we encounter a request to do 
> something not possible with a given format, we try to ask "is there a 
> particular thing that the human almost certainly meant when they made this 
> impossible request?"
> 
> For example OpenEXR's least accurate pixel data type ('half') has more 
> precision and range than JPEG's most accurate type, so there will be data 
> loss, but we don't want to make every operation that starts with exr and ends 
> with jpg to be an error. So we just convert any input pixel data type to 
> UINT8 when outputting a JPEG. For most ordinary images, the data is LDR and 
> our eyes are mostly satisfied with 8 bits in an sRGB-mapped intensity 
> response, so this conversion will probably be fine. ("If you wanted to 
> preserve the HDR data, you should not have output to JPEG, dummy.")
> 
> But what if we are asked to save more channels than a file format can 
> accommodate? If you just drop the channels, you're not just reducing 
> precision, you are losing whole sections of the original data. So at present, 
> we make it a hard error.
> 
> As a special case (and maybe precedent?), we do just silently drop an alpha 
> channel when saving JPEG. JPEG cannot accommodate alpha, but it's so common 
> for an input to have alpha, it was painful for it to be an error when saving 
> to JPEG. It seemed that the obvious human interpretation was "I'm using JPEG 
> because this is final output for the web or for my mom to view, the alpha 
> that was valuable for intermediate computations won't be needed for those 
> purposes, so drop it."
> 
> I think that at the low level of ImageInput, open() should fail if you ask 
> for more channels than can be supported in any obvious way. But for oiiotool 
> in particular, I think we can make more "best guess" heuristics.
> 
> I'm certainly open to this being debated!
> 
> When oiiotool is outputting to a format that doesn't support as many channels 
> as the image appears to have, do you think we should just silently output the 
> first 3 channels and drop the rest? Should this be the one and only behavior? 
> Or should there be a "strict/lax" option that determines whether this (and 
> potentially other conversions) are an error or silently do whatever is 
> necessary to complete the action somehow? If so, should the default be strict 
> or lax?
> 
>    -- lg
> 
> 
> (Note for the pedants in the crowd: most of the places I wrote "JPEG", I'm 
> not really talking about the JPEG compression, but rather the JFIF file 
> format.)
> 
> 
>> On Feb 5, 2015, at 3:56 PM, Justin Israel <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> I was curious about some behavior in oiiotool v1.4.14, when dealing with a 
>> source image that has 6 channels, and converting it to a jpeg. 
>> 
>> oiiotool source.exr -o out.jpg
>> # oiiotool ERROR: jpeg does not support 6-channel images
>> 
>> I presume this bubbles up from libjpeg. Fair enough. But I know that the 
>> mantra of OpenImageIO has usually been to try and do the right default 
>> action, and attempt to avoid failures if possible. That being said, do you 
>> think it would be more in line with that philosophy if the jpeg plugin 
>> ensured it would only use 1, 3, or 4 of the first available channels, if not 
>> using an explicit list already? That way you would still get a jpg output, 
>> even if you passed it a 6 channel image, but could still explicitly give is 
>> a channel list if you knew them up front. 
>> 
>> Currently I have to inspect the source image first before calling oiiotool, 
>> and ensure that I pass it a reduced channel list if needed. 
>> 
>> Justin
> 
> --
> Larry Gritz
> [email protected]
> 
> 
> 
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