Did we decided on a standard for which dtypes we will support? 

Some of the color conversions can be sped up in Cython with a lut (ala scivi), but we would need to write one func for each dtype.

I am working on a webinar for image processing and am getting back into using th scikit, so there are some things I'm seeing during use that I would like to improve, but would require knowledge of what dtypes to support.

Chris 

2010/11/5 Stéfan van der Walt <stefan@sun.ac.za>
Hi all,

At the SciPy sprint (ages ago), Chris suggested that we clean up the
image loading API.  The following changes simplify `imread` by
removing the `dtype` argument.  This allows for simpler plugins.
Because `as_grey` is such a commonly used parameter, it is left in
place, but now works differently: after the image is loaded, the (new)
rgb2grey is simply performed on it.

Please have a look at

https://github.com/stefanv/scikits.image/compare/master...io_cleanup

Regards
Stéfan