Digital Light & Color

Most of the images I work on are astronomical. My pre-processing software, used for calibration, natively creates 32-bit floating point TIFF, though it can also write 16- or 32-bit integer TIFF. I have no idea if 32-bit integer TIFF is even possible for the Windows codec, but it would be nice, even if I can only use a few of the tools (mostly grayscale level and curve adjustments).

I'm not sure if the Microsoft codec supports 32-bits per channel in all its forms. They have defined these formats in their header files but I don't know if they have implemented them. One way to check is if Windows Explorer displays a thumbnail for a sample file since it uses the codec to generate the thumbnails. I don't really have access to sample images here so you will have to try it.

Adding support for reading 32-bit TIFF files (32-bit integer grayscale, 96-bit integer color, 32-bit float grayscale, 96-bit float color) would probably be a lot of work considering it has very limited utility for non-astro photography.

Thanks for the tip on checking the preview. It does work; in fact, it does previews for 32-bit floating point, too, so the codec appears to know how to handle them at least.

I guess I'll end up bouncing back and forth between PWP and GIMP; I just discovered that GIMP will read them and process them, but I really like the new workflow in PWP8.

If you can send me some sample image files I could possibly add code to read them and convert them to 16-bit integer on the fly. Not sure if that would be useful enough, but at least it's not that much work.