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> One thing that open source libraries do tend to miss is that very important extra metadata - for example, Phase One IIQ files have an embedded sensor profile or full on black frame that is not yet encoded into the raw data like it typically is for a NEF or DNG from many cameras.

In astronomy/astrophotography the FITS format[1] is commonly used, which supports all these things and is, as the name suggests, extremely flexible. I wonder why it never caught on in regular photography.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITS

Oh interesting! This seems like it would be a good fit ;)

Especially for really old setups that had RGB color wheels and multiple exposures, exactly like a multispectral astro image might. Phase one also has a multispectral capture system for cultural heritage, which just shoots individual IIQs to my knowledge… It would work great too for multiple pixel shift shots.

Possibly, the engineers just didn’t know about it when they were asked to write the firmware? It’s funny, I think most RAW formats are just weird TIFFs to some degree, so why not use this instead.

Yes. TIFF would "fit the bil" here. It deals with multspectral satellite images. It supports 32 and 64 bits floats and 16bits integers.

Oh nice, I didn't know that TIFF could handle that as well!

TIFF is almost an multidimensional array serialization format. Obviously is centered on images but it can have many layers. Usualy RGBA but they can be have other interpretations. It supports some level of streamed writting and random access over HTTP or other ranged protocols.

> Possibly, the engineers just didn’t know about it when they were asked to write the firmware?

Considering how often I witnessed engineers trying to build something to solve a problem instead of sitting down and researching if someone else did that already, and likely better, I really wouldn’t be surprised if that is the answer to most questions in this thread.

Can't you just throw such frames into additional IFDs or SubIFDs?

Maybe? I’m not familiar enough with DNG to say - possibly that wasn’t a thing when Phase One first started using IIQ? I doubt it was around when Sinar was - in fact the last two (esprit 65 & S30|45 ) Sinar backs do use DNG as an option!

But can I see the difference in that applied metadata?