What is the simplest RGB image format?

Question

I am working in C on a physics experiment, Young\'s interference experiment and i made a program who prints to file a huge bunch of pixels :

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Answer 1

You probably want to use the PPM format which is what you're looking for: a minimal header followed by raw RGB.

Answer 2

TARGA (file name extension .tga) may be the simplest widely supported binary image file format if you don't use compression and don't use any of its extensions. It's even simpler than Windows .bmp files and is supported by ImageMagick and many paint programs. It has been my go-to format when I just need to output some pixels from a throwaway program.

Here's a minimal C program to generate an image to standard output:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

enum { width = 550, height = 400 };

int main(void) {
  static unsigned char pixels[width * height * 3];
  static unsigned char tga[18];
  unsigned char *p;
  size_t x, y;

  p = pixels;
  for (y = 0; y < height; y++) {
    for (x = 0; x < width; x++) {
      *p++ = 255 * ((float)y / height);
      *p++ = 255 * ((float)x / width);
      *p++ = 255 * ((float)y / height);
    }
  }
  tga[2] = 2;
  tga[12] = 255 & width;
  tga[13] = 255 & (width >> 8);
  tga[14] = 255 & height;
  tga[15] = 255 & (height >> 8);
  tga[16] = 24;
  tga[17] = 32;
  return !((1 == fwrite(tga, sizeof(tga), 1, stdout)) &&
           (1 == fwrite(pixels, sizeof(pixels), 1, stdout)));
}

Answer 3

Here's a minimal example that writes your image file with a minimal PPM header:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

#include <math.h> // compile with gcc -lm

int main(){
    /* Setup for Young's interference image */
    #define width 256
    unsigned char raster_matrix[width*width], h[3];
    #define WAVE(x,y) sin(sqrt( (x)*(x)+(y)*(y) ) / 3.0)
    #define hue(c) (h[0] = c, h[1] = 128, h[2] = 255-c, h)

    int x, y, i = 0;
    for (y = 0; y < width; y++) for (x = 0; x < width; x++)
        raster_matrix[i++] = 128 + 64*(WAVE(x,y) + WAVE(x,width-y));


    /* Open PPM File */
    FILE *file = fopen("young.ppm", "wb"); if (!file) return -1;

    /* Write PPM Header */
    fprintf(file, "P6 %d %d %d\n", width, width, 255); /* width, height, maxval */

    /* Write Image Data */
    for (i=0; i < width*width; i++)
        fwrite(hue(raster_matrix[i]), 1, 3, file);

    /* Close PPM File */
    fclose(file);

    /* All done */
    return 0;
}

I wrote the header code based on the specs at http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppm.html. For this image, the header is just a string of fifteen bytes: "P6 256 256 255\n".

The setup code here is slightly hackish, but makes it possible to concisely demonstrate the code with the exact for loop body given in the question.

Answer 4

The recently created farbfeld format is quite minimal, though there is not much software supporting it (at least so far).

Bytes                  │ Description
8                      │ "farbfeld" magic value
4                      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)
4                      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)
(2+2+2+2)*width*height │ 4*16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major