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Writing image data to the disk as fast as possible – Photoshop

I am writing an application that generates a huge amount of images. Each frame is 1280×800 pixels large and has 1 byte per pixel for color information (greyscale). Each of the frames must be written to disk.

Currently I simply dump the raw pixel data to a binary file on the disk. The file can then be viewed with a special viewer I also created.

This is a very unsatisfactory solution, since the images can’t be viewed/processed directly. They always have to run through my custom viewer/converter.

Is there an image format I could use to write my images to disk that:

  1. Is fast to be written (no compression etc.)
  2. Does not increase the final file’s size much
  3. Supports dumping my raw pixel buffer in there (no alignemnt changes etc.)
  4. Can be read by common applications (Windows Explorer, Paint, Photoshop etc.)

I already tried to use .png, but the file generation takes much too long due to the compression.

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2

Answers


  1. 0

    Have a look at the binary Portable GrayMap (P5) format. It consists of an extremely simple header followed by raw image data (without any alignment requirements), and is widely supported by image viewers.

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  2. 0

    Both bmp and tiff can be used to save raw data. Bmp has the oddity of having image upside down, unless height is negative. And tiff has plenty of encoding options. It should be anyway feasible to reverse engineer the format to be used as a template, where the image data is copy pasted. So no need to use a library: just a header, image data and an optional footer concatenated.

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