In article <cja### [at] netplexaussieorg> , 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>  wrote:

>> However it would be much nicer if POV directly supported 16bit PNG
>> (or TIFF)...
>
> In addition, the whole arrangement of having TGA handled specially in
> height fields seems unsatisfactory. For one thing, there are 24 bits
> available in most RGB images, but 8 are wasted. Height fields internally
> store values as short ints, but there are other uses now such as
> isosurfaces, so might as well put that third byte to use.
> The hf_gray_16 option generally looks badly designed, it seems really
> out of place in global_settings when other file output options are part
> of the command line or .ini file. I would have done it as a file output
> option useable with any format, and a special toggle to make the height
> field load an RG/RGB-encoded-grayscale instead of an ordinary RGB file.

Yes.  These options simply were created over time, and the really relevant
changes were not made in time.  In 3.5 a lot of this way changes as support
for true 16 bit grayscale and image data was added.  However, the image
reading hasn't been updated to support this yet.  Only function images use
this feature so far.  For PNG this will be in 3.51, but some of the other
formats don't offer such an easy interface to 16 bit image data that could
be used in POV-Ray :-(

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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