[Image-SIG] 48-bit RGB in PIL

[Gilligan, Jonathan M]

I have started working a lot with 36-bit and 48-bit color images 
(TIFF and Nikon NEF files with 12 to 16 bits per band), and I would 
like to be able to use PIL on these.

To make this possible, I am interested in extending PIL to handle 
48-bit color. I think that it should be fairly easy to do this with 
a few mods to imaging.c to add a new mode.

If there is any documentation of the PIL internals that would help 
me find the places where assumptions are made of the kinds of modes 
there are, it would be helpful.

If others would be interested in this and if I am successful at 
adding this mode, I would be happy to post patches here.

On the other hand, if others are working hard at this already, I 
would not like to reinvent the wheel.

Jonathan