Binary file formats

Radiance RGBE encoder

Encode nonnegative linear RGB into a shared-exponent RGBE pixel.

Your inputs

Start with an example

Example result

Choose a shared binary exponent from the largest channel. Scale each channel into an 8-bit mantissa and store exponent+128.

Linear RGB (1,0.5,0.25) encodes as 80 40 20 81.

No gamma or color-space conversion. Maxima below 10⁻³² encode as black. This emits one pixel, not an HDR file.