[Image-SIG] Floating-point (color) TIFF

[Ragan-Kelley Jonathan]

I am using Python for the first time on a film effects
project which is largely built around the color [rgb]
floating-point TIFFs output from Pixar's RenderMan
renderer.  I was excited at all of the built-in
functionality of Python, especially when paired with a
few additional support libraries like PIL, but my
first attempts to load the images with PIL yielded
failure.

PIL claims support for floating-point TIFFs, but it
seems to only include single-channel files, not RGB or
RGBA in FP32.

I have some old C code specifically built to load
these relatively uncommon TIFFs, but it seems that PIL
*should* support them, with at most a minimum of work.
 Does anyone here have any experience with these
files, in particular, or any pointers on how to most
quickly and painlessly add support for them? 
${python}/lib/site-packages/PIL/TiffImagePlugin.py
seems to implement all of the basic TIFF IO
functionality, but it isn't obvious -- superficially
at least -- where I might quickly add support for
RGB[A]/FP32.

Any other recommendations?  I'm not particularly
wedded to PIL, as I'm primarily using it for image
loading.  Bringing out my old code and wrapping it
with SWIG is an easy option, but it would always be
nice to use existing, commonly-installed
infrastructure rather than unnecessarily requiring
custom libraries.

Thanks.
-jrk

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