On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 10:48 PM, Schoenberger <[email protected]> wrote: > Not like .IFF, which can also do everything (even maya scene files are > actually the .IFF format). > MAC and PC save the format differently, RGB + CMYK + YCbCr + CIE Lab, 5 > different compressions (lzw required a paid license), prefilters.. > TIFF has pages (I think the official paper has about 100 pages) for its > specification, IFF only 1-2 pages. > Therefore I can understand if not all features are implemented by every app. > > .exr is a complete different story. > It just works because you have a complete loader/writer because it is open > source or you can download a compiled .dll. > You can not make any mistake.
TIFF and OpenEXR are the same story, actually. Every application is using the open source implementation of TIFF, libtiff http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/ Nobody is reading the spec and trying to implement that. For OpenEXR, many applications are using the simplified "RGBA" interface, or need channels called "R", "G".. in either case if you have different channels, nothing will load. Also, there are various versions of the OpenEXR library in the wild and you may not be able to load newer files. (Tiff is much older and therefore the library has changed less often) A user that's producing CYMK or CIE textures and baffled at TIFF is probably not smart enough to understand OpenEXR better and will run into problem with that as well. At one point, I think you have understand your craft and tools. Tiff does the right thing, it's adobe's portable, multi channel image format that saves all the bits you can produce in Photoshop except for layer information. An app that needs RGB input shouldn't be trying to emulate a printer to get CMYK color it got right, the user deserves that to fail. Mental Image dropped support for LZW compression because there was a dispute for a patent, which expired in 2003. There is no license to pay to use it since then. Mental Ray added support for it back in version 3.10 Softimage should have made a TIFF file parser replacement for mental ray to save us all from all these support issues for the last 12 years. It's another case of misplaced priorities in rendering IMHO. What I did on my side of the app was log a warning to tell the user that the image clip uses a compression not supported by mental ray.
