<HTML><BODY><div class="cl-d0nxoiarvd">Why not just "rgb-dem", i.e. "RGB encoded DEM"?<br><br> <div class="mail-quote-collapse"><blockquote style="border-left:1px solid #0857A6;margin:10px;padding:0 0 0 10px"><span>Friday, January 9, 2026 3:16 AM +03:00 from rayg via gdal-dev <<a href="mailto:gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org">gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org</a>>:</span><br> <div><div id=""><div class="cl-j0sotz16cy"><div class="js-helper_mr_css_attr js-readmsg-msg_mr_css_attr"><div id="style_17679177741572785247_mr_css_attr"><div id="style_17679177741572785247_BODY_mr_css_attr">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.<div> </div><div>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.</div><div> </div><div>More general would be scalar encoding of any multichannel (multiband) file, e.g. YCbCr, HSV, CMYK, etc.<div> </div><div>Ray<br><br><br> <div class="flockmail-quote-id-<af905f43-69e7-43cf-8e72-1db786df9a45@spatialys.com>_mr_css_attr flockmail-quote_mr_css_attr gmail_quote_mr_css_attr"><div><span>On Thu, 8 Jan 2026 at 1:13 PM Even wrote:</span></div><div class="mail-quote-collapse"><div><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote_mr_css_attr"><pre>>
> 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
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