What are the differences between the photometric options for GDAL_merge?

Question

I am using GDAL_merge to merge several geotiff tiles into one large tile. One of the creation options I can add is photometric. There are several options for this.

• MINISBLACK
• MINISWHITE
• RGB
• CMYK
• YCBCR
• CIELAB
• ICCLAB
• ITULAB

What are the differences between these different outputs? I understand the MINISBLACK and MINISWHITE options, but the others are less clear.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The chosen value is stored in the PhotometricInterpretation TIFF tag, which defines the color space, i.e. how to interpret the values of the bands. Example for a 3-band GeoTIFF defined as RGB: band 1 = red, band 2 = green, band 3 = blue. CMYK stands for the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK color space, etc.