On Jun 15, 2016, at 1:17 AM, Michel Lerenard <[email protected]> wrote: > > I jump on this thread to bump a topic mentionned a few months back: adding > tags in tiffs to be able to store extra channels names. > Is it planned ?
This has come up before. I think it would be a good thing, the question is what to do about it. One potential strategy would be to adopt an OIIO-only solution of hijacking the ImageDescription field, in a similar way to how for textures we store the SHA-1 hash in the ImageDescription for formats that don't support arbitrary metadata. For example, we could add "oiio:ChannelNames=R,G,B,A" or whatever. One advantage to this is that it doesn't need to be TIFF-specific, we could actually employ that strategy for any format that lacks explicit channel names but allows for at least an ImageDescription. The disadvantage is, of course, that only OIIO-based software would understand it. (Though that's a growing number of apps these days.) An alternate, or at least a secondary long-term approach, is to bring this up with the libtiff folks and try to get an actual TIFF tag officially or unofficially designated for channel names. The downside is that it would be TIFF only, but it would potentially be a real feature of the format, not just some hack honoured only by us. I suppose we could also do both -- lobby for a TIFF tag, which will probably take some time and effort, but also implement the ImageDescription hack in the mean time (and after, for other formats that still don't have explicit channel names). Thoughts? -- Larry Gritz [email protected] _______________________________________________ Oiio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org
