Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
>
> Primarily because libtiff is of frighteningly poor quality in many aspects
> of anything but the most common TIFF features. Even those features supported
> well are relatively hard to use compared to other image support libraries.
> Not to mention, getting libtiff to compile is an adventure of its own ;-)

I'd like to think the library's been beaten into submission by this point,
but yeah, TIFF as a format can be pretty baroque.

> You are welcome to create such an export feature, but I just wonder,and I am
> not sure you have asked or answered that question yourself: Which programs
> (other than POV-Ray itself probably once you added it) actually support
> import at any significant degree so that it would be useful? _ I honestly
> know none that can internally use full float colors right now.

I'm not a PhotoShop user, but since you didn't mention it, I guess that
one's out. Krita (from the KDE koffice suite) can edit in float space, and
I wouldn't put it past many of the upstart shareware image-editing programs
that are out there.

Since I'm planning on using a mostly-custom toolchain, app support isn't too
big a deal for me. I just want to be able to get the data out of POV-Ray in
a [somewhat] standardized format.

> And, btw, are there more or fewer programs supporting the HDR formats
> supported by POV-Ray 3.7 already? - I know a few, and my personal guess is
> there is a way to convert from float TIFF to most HDR formats, but I just
> don't know if there would be any benefit...

Huh. I wasn't aware that the beta supported RGBE and OpenEXR---I'd looked at
the documentation (sec. 3.1.2.4.1 "Output File Type"), not the ChangeLog.

Okay, if you're putting in EXR support, then that pretty much ends the
discussion :-)  OpenEXR makes so much more sense; I just didn't want to
deal with pulling in another third-party library. I have a couple
questions:

1) Will POV-Ray 3.7 support writing EXR with 32-bit floats, in addition to
16-bit halfs?

2) How do you select EXR output in the beta? I thought the bundled
documentation would have been updated to mention this; is there somewhere
else I should be looking?

3) Out of curiosity, is there any value in writing out all five of POV-Ray's
color channels, using EXR's arbitrary-layer support?

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