[gdal-dev] Support for Terrain-RGB

[Andrey VI]

Why not just "rgb-dem", i.e. "RGB encoded DEM"?

 
>Friday, January 9, 2026 3:16 AM +03:00 from rayg via gdal-dev < gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org >:
> 
>Maybe call it "scalar-rgb"? Because ultimately what the encoding does is use the color channels to hold a single value. It doesn't even have to be for elevations at all.
> 
>Could also add swizzle options in case BGR or some other order is used. And include the alpha channel just in case, but also let alpha be alpha if needed. If e.g. "A" is left off from the swizzle option, then it's an actual alpha channel.
> 
>More general would be scalar encoding of any multichannel (multiband) file, e.g. YCbCr, HSV, CMYK, etc.
> 
>Ray
>
>
> 
>On Thu, 8 Jan 2026 at 1:13 PM Even wrote:
>>>
>>> There's nothing especially terrain (or topography) about this afaics, 
>>> and utility seems like the right approach rather than creating a 
>>> format variant.
>>
>>Actually Frédéric's intersting remark abou potential usage with "gdal 
>>raster tile" would actually make the driver approach a better 
>>choice....   unless we would extend "gdal raster tile" to accept a 
>>pipeline to go to create a final tile from a 'raw' one, like 'gdal 
>>raster tile --tile-pipeline="read ! encode-rgb --offset=-10000 ! write 
>>--of PNG" --extension png  in.tif out_directory' .
>>
>>But a ENCODE_RGB driver approach is more simple than implementing that.
>>
>>Even
>>
>>-- 
>>http://www.spatialys.com
>>My software is free, but my time generally not.
>>
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> 
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--
Andrey
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