HDR and scientific image file formats

Formats that store more than a screen can show: floating point brightness for film and rendering work, textures ready for a graphics card, and calibrated measurements from telescopes, scanners and instruments, where each pixel is a value to analyse rather than a colour to display.

Formats

.DCM

DICOM medical image

Medical scans with patient and study details, as tagged data elements.

.DDS

DirectDraw Surface

DirectX textures, usually block-compressed, with mipmaps and cube maps.

.EXR

OpenEXR image

Floating point HDR images with many channels, for film and rendering.

.FITS

Flexible Image Transport System

Astronomy’s images and tables, with plain text headers in 2880-byte blocks.

.HDR

Radiance HDR image

High dynamic range images with a shared exponent per pixel, used for lighting.

.KTX

Khronos Texture

GPU-ready textures with mipmaps for OpenGL, Vulkan and glTF.

.PFM

Portable Float Map

Uncompressed 32-bit float images after a three-line text header.