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# 2.3 Storage formats

All storage formats have other values for the `Coding` field. This release supports only `IM_CODING_LABQ` format.

`IM_CODING_LABQ` stores , and for each pixel, with 10 bits for and 11 bits for each of and . These 32 bits are packed into 4 bytes, with the most significant 8 bits of each value in the first 3 bytes, and the left-over bits packed into the final byte as 2:3:3.

This format is a little awkward to process. Some VIPS functions can work directly on `IM_CODING_LABQ` images (`im_extract()`, for example), but most will require you to unpack the image to one of the computation formats (for example with `im_LabQ2Lab()`) first.