Tingopix saves a binned debayered output with stabilization cropping (tiff 1904x1300 16bit x RGB ~15MB) or the sensor raw with the embedded sprocket position (tiff 4064 x 3040 16bit ~ 25MB). The idea is to have a workable half sensor resolution rgb straight out of the scanning, or, when better debaryering and more resolution is needed (16 mm for example), saving the raw and batch process the raw files into a debayered rgb. Either way, with a 16bit depth color pipeline.
I have been using uncompressed tiff, and the resulting full-sensor rgb files are huge! 74MB.
AI suggested the alternative of OpenEXR, and the resulting file (slightly cropped for stabilization) is in the 22 to 29 MB range. I used pyexr as currently not doing anything with opencv.
OpenEXR looks very decent, just see that Rawtherapee does not support it, DarkTable does.
Thoughts? other alternatives?
I spent some time thinking about this same question a few months ago. JPEG XL (.jxl files) started to look pretty interesting just for cutting the size of these raw reels on disc in half.
Just for some context: JPEG is from 1992, made for the processing power of computers in 1992. The JPEG 2000 standard never seemed to catch on. JPEG XL was released as a standard in 2022 and supports a lot of different use-cases, both lossy and lossless.
They’ve got a kind of marketing/comparison page that does a nice job of extolling the benefits, here. And it appears to be picking up some industry support: Apple and Adobe already support it pretty broadly. The major browsers have either already deployed it or are in the middle of doing so. The group that controls the PDF standard is adding support for the format, etc.
Notably: there is a lossless, 32-bit mode that beats TIFF by around 50%. And the format is already supported in newer versions of OpenCV. Those were my criteria before it was even a candidate. After that, I’d seen those encoding/decoding speed graphs on the page above (showing the format beating most other formats), which really piqued my interest.
I haven’t gotten so far as actually trying it out yet, but it’s definitely on my radar. It seems to be occupying the “latest and greatest” position at the moment.
I also haven’t tried these, but a quick check seems to indicate that Darktable and RawTherapee both have some support for JXL files now.
