Re:Lepton image compression: saving 22% losslessly from imag...
by rleigh on Sunday July 17, 2016 @05:55AM
(#12109603)
While PNG (and libpng) are reasonable for their intended purpose as a GIF replacement for simple RGB and greyscale graphics, it doesn't compare when it comes to the power and flexibility of TIFF, from sample format and depth, to sample count, image orientation, tiling and many additional features.
TIFF is showing its age at this point, with a some high-end scientific applications switching to HDF5. But PNG simply isn't featureful enough for this type of data.
In practice you probably shouldn't do that without changing the file extension and the magic bytes to avoid confusion among users and poorly written software.