2004.09.01 20:39 "[Tiff] Stacked tiffs with colourmaps", by David Scriven

I am creating 8 & 16 bit stacked tiffs that represent slices (or planes) of a 3-D image. Each individual plane has its own directory and associated colourmap. The colourmap for each plane is the same. This is OK (but wasteful) for 8-bit TIFFS as it adds 1.5kb (2*3*256) to each plane, but for 16-bit images it is ridiculous as it adds 393 kb to each plane - for an 80 plane image it would add over 30MB to the size of the stored image (assuming that there is no compression when a colourmap is stored).

Is there any easier/ more efficient way to do this? - it would seem to make sense if only one colourmap was added that all the planes could refer to.

These images are usually visualized by using the (free) programs NIH Image, ImageJ or Scion Image, and any changes I made to the files would have to be compatible with these programs.