TIFF

Revision as of 15:37, 25 January 2015

TIFF, formerly known as Tag(ged) Image File Format, is an image format capable of storing multiple high quality images in a single file.

A TIFF image may be uncompressed or use a compression scheme internally. Two of the most widely used compression schemes in TIFF files are lossless, including LZW and, for bitonal images CCITT Group 4, as used for facsimile transmission [fax]. JPEG baseline DCT-based lossy compression is also used.

Several subtypes and extensions of TIFF exist, including TIFF/EP, TIFF/IT, DNG, GeoTIFF, TIFF-FX, and BigTIFF. Multi-image TIFFs may represent sequences of images (such as scanned pages of a document), image tiles, or different versions of the same image, for example Pyramid TIFFs that incorporate images at different resolutions (often tiled). Some software that can read and display a TIFF file may only open the primary image.

Identification

TIFF files begin with bytes 4D 4D 00 2A (big-endian), or 49 49 2A 00 (little-endian).

This does not account for BigTIFF format, which you may or may not consider to be a kind of TIFF.

File signatures

Some TIFF-like formats use a different file signature (the first few bytes of the file) to help identify them. Some of the known signatures are listed here.

(For formats lacking a public specification, this table may include a hypothetical signature for a byte order that has not been observed.)

Compression

Tag 259 indicates the image compression scheme, as a coded integer. Some of the known compression schemes are listed below. Some of these are not used in genuine TIFF files, but only in other TIFF-like formats.

Private/rogue compression codes:

Color types

Tag 262 indicates the color type ("photometric interpretation") of the image, as a coded integer. Some of the known color types are listed below.

Related formats

See also Category:TIFF.

• Tag 32932 contains TIFF annotation data.

• Tag 33723 contains IPTC data.

• Tag 34377 contains Photoshop Image Resources.

• Tags 34665 (Exif IFD), 34853 (GPS IFD), and 40965 (Interoperability IFD) point to Exif directories.

• Tag 34675 contains an ICC profile.

• Tag 37724 (ImageSourceData) contains "Layer and Mask Information" from PSD format.

• Tag 50933 (ExtraCameraProfiles) points to DNG camera profiles.

• Raw camera formats are often based on TIFF.

Specifications

• TIFF, Revision 6.0 (1992-06-03)
• TIFF Revision 5.0 (1988-08-08): HTML, Text
• Tag Image File Format Rev 4.0 (1987-04-31): HTML, Text
• Adobe PageMaker 6.0 TIFF Technical Notes (1995-09-14)
• Adobe Photoshop TIFF Technical Notes (2002-03-22) - Defines tag 37724, compression types 7 and 8, photometric interpretation types 8 and 9
• Adobe Photoshop TIFF Technical Note 3 (2005-04-08)

Metadata tags

• AWare Systems TIFF Tag Reference
• http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/TIFF_Metadata_Final.pdf
• http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/content/tiff_tags.shtml

Metaformat files

• Synalysis grammar file (for Hexinator / Synalize It!; more details)

Software

Most multi-format image viewers and editors support TIFF to some extent. Applications listed here have been selected arbitrarily.

• LibTIFF
• TIFF.js
• XnView
• IrfanView

Sample files

• http://www.fileformat.info/format/tiff/sample/index.htm
• http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/images.html
• http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/data/tif/tif.html
• https://github.com/openplanets/format-corpus/tree/master/tiff-examples

External links

• Wikipedia article
• TIFF File Format Summary, from the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats
• Adobe Developer Resources for TIFF
• JHOVE2 TIFF Module Specification 2.0.0 (useful TIFF information)
• TIFF chart