png or tiff

[Matt Graham]

On 2017-11-12 07:21, Matthew Crews wrote:
> TIFF I think has opened up, but once upon a time it was
> patent encumbered to a degree, like GIF.

The specs for TIFF were always open, the only thing that was ever a 
problem was the LZW compressor.  All the other compressors were 
available, but they weren't widely used because LZW worked the best for 
most things.  And the patent expired years ago IIRC.

> Upon further research I have learned that (at least in GIMP) you can
> save TIFFs using the same compression algorithm as PNG, and file size
> difference between the two will he negligible.

Support for different compression formats can vary a lot.  Image 
viewers may go "OMGWTF" when presented with a JPEG TIFF, because they're 
expecting LZW, G3, G4, or None.

> There may be some uses for saving pictures in TIFF format that I'm
> not aware of

TIFF is the only widely-used thing that supports a single file with 
multiple images inside of it.  The mostly-standardized tags you can 
apply to images were very useful before EXIF on JPEGs became more 
standardized.  If you have black and white images, G4 is the best 
compression method.

> Most web browser do NOT support TIFF

That right there is the reason it's not widely used.  If scanner 
software didn't usually produce TIFF by default, practically no one 
would use the format.

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