P: Support JPEG 2000 file format, please

@168669: If it were me, I'd take the path of least resistance and convert all jpeg2000 files to tiff or jpeg, but I respect your willingness to keep fighting the good fight.. - I hope you win.

Uh, no. There are several thousand times more TIFF files out there (and more JPEG than that).

JPEG2000 is widely used in some narrow fields, but it really is not that widely used overall.

Rob, thanks for the thoughtful reply. The perception of JPEG 2000 is a tale of ongoing ironies. It's thought of as lacking adoption, yet the reality is that there may be more JPEG 2000 files out there than TIFs. When you just consider that the Internet Archive, Google Books, and the LDS (FamilySearch) folks alone employ JPEG 2000 at scale, we are talking about still image numbers in the billions if not trillions. Internet Archive alone estimates that they have scanned 2.1 million books at their scanning centers > 2.1 million x 200 pgs. per average book = 420 billion.

Personally, I use JPEG 2000 in the digital production lab that I run at UConn. Unlike the examples above who employ enterprise, somewhat monolithic, command-line software for their JP2000 encoding, I wish to keep JP2000 encoding/decoding within my existing Lightroom DNG-editing ecosystem. The student photographers that I hire come to the job with basic Lightroom and Photoshop experience that I like to leverage when I teach them power use of both programs. I currently have LR hand-off edited DNGs to PS batch actions for JP2000 creation. Though this works, the workflow could be much smoother if LR simply did a straight JP2000 export itself (like Capture One). In turn, JP2000 import would be great for file validation and quality control purposes. Currently I use Bridge for visual QC, which again is another programmatic hand off.

A year ago or so, I tested the LR JP2000 import plugin that you mention. It didn't work to scale and hung a lot. The ImageMagick-based Exportant plugin sounds promising, but also has issues as you mention. Though such 3rd party plugins aren't yet ready for this purpose, I'm happy to at least see the developer community attempt to build such tools for JP2000. I appreciate that. Yet perhaps their current shortcomings additionally point towards the need for Adobe itself to build in such LR functionality in a more stable way. JPEG 2000's beneficial compression attributes can be leveraged by anyone with an image archive of any size, not just libraries and archives. If anything, personal digital archives are getting larger, not smaller with time and with higher-megapixel sensor trends even among camera phones.

How it seems to me: (I'm not a jpeg2000 expert)
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Lack of acceptance for jpeg2000 is one of those sad things in technology history.

Summary: better than jpeg, png, and tiff, and could replace all 3, but never will.

Bottom-line: what matters most is NOT how many plusses something has, but whether there is one deal breaker ;-}.

I don't know what the deal breaker was, but obviously there was one.. (assuming my assessment of general superiority is on target, which nobody seems to dispute, other than it takes more horsepower, but since the requisite horsepower is there on all modern systems, that seems like a non-issue in most contexts..).

jpeg2000 is not dead, but is barely alive.

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Regardless of how it seems to me:
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If you too are a die-hard, consider using this plugin so Lightroom can read your jpeg2000 files as if they were any other supported file type:

http://www.lightroom-plugins.com/JP2i...

Note: this satisfies the "import" part.

PS - I tried conversion to jp2 (upon export) using Exportant plugin (Image Magick "filter"), and it works, but color is a bit off, and it sometimes bombs, so I can't really recommend it.

Example parameters:
-format jp2 -define jp2:rate=.5
(rates are from 0 to 1, where 1 means lossless)

News: problem with color when converting to jpeg2000 via image magick is now an acknowledged bug (of the icc profile handling variety), so it should be fixed soon. - standby if you're interested in exporting jpeg2000.
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Rob

JPEG 2000 still does a better job than ZIP regarding lossless compression and offers even greater proportional file size savings through its optional lossy compression choices. Please see the sample metrics that I've included in this thread.

Yes, LZW can increase the size on 16 bit/channel data.
ZIP does a much better job for 16 and 32 bit/channel data.
ZIP is already a widely supported compression method in TIFF.

Some additional food for thought, just to further follow up with supporting comparative metrics of RGB-rendered derivatives each made from an undemosaiced DNG Raw file that I picked at random:

Uncompressed TIF, 16 bit, sRGB: 132.8 MB

ZIP Compressed TIF, 16 bit, sRGB: 111.2 MB

LZW Compressed TIF, 16 bit, sRGB: 160.8 MB

JPEG 2000 Lossless Compressed, 16 bit, sRGB: 86.1 MB

JPEG 2000 Lossy Compressed ("visually lossless," Photoshop Quality Level 50, Fast Mode), 16 bit, sRGB: 3.85 MB

It's my understanding that with 16 bit data, LZW losslessly-compressed TIFs can actually grow in size from their uncompressed counterparts. I suppose you could losslessly-compress TIF through ZIP, but I don't know of any image editing software that deals with ZIP files in any elegant way (whereas Photoshop and Capture One support JPEG 2000). In either case, I believe that JPEG 2000 lossless compression would still win out over ZIP with 16 bit data. But please feel free to correct me on this score.

But beyond its lossless option, JPEG 2000 can be visually lossless at pretty high compression rates (i.e. data lossy). It is why institutions like the Library of Congress, Harvard U., Internet Archive, The Wellcome Library (UK), and the LDS (FamilySearch) folks employ JPEG 2000 at scale.

Why are you comparing a compressed file to an uncompressed file?
Compare the size to a compressed TIFF.