Farbfeld

Farbfeld is a small, uncompressed bitmap image format designed for simplicity and testing. It provides a straightforward, portable way to store RGBA image data without compression or metadata.

The file begins with an 8-byte ASCII header containing the string farbfeld. This is followed by two 4-byte big-endian unsigned integers representing the image width and height. The remainder of the file consists of width × height pixels, with each pixel encoded as four consecutive bytes in RGBA order. Each color channel (red, green, blue, alpha) is 8 bits. The alpha channel is part of the data and commonly uses 255 for opaque pixels. Pixels are stored in row-major order from the top-left to the bottom-right, left to right within each row.

Because it has no compression or metadata, farbfeld is valued for its predictability and ease of parsing. It is particularly useful for benchmarking image processing routines or serving as a simple testbed when developing software that handles raw pixel data. Its simplicity also makes it easy to implement in small utilities or reference code.

Limitations of farbfeld include its lack of color management information, absence of metadata, and potential inefficiency for large images due to its uncompressed nature. It is not a widely adopted interchange format in production workflows, but remains a convenient format for testing and demonstration.

Related topics include other raw or minimally described image formats and general concepts of uncompressed RGBA storage. Extensions or tooling sometimes use the .ff extension to denote farbfeld files.