TIFF
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, 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.
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Specifications
- TIFF, Revision 6.0 (1992-06-03)
- Adobe PageMaker 6.0 TIFF Technical Notes (1995-09-14)
- Adobe Photoshop TIFF Technical Notes (2002-03-22)
- Adobe Photoshop TIFF Technical Note 3 (2005-04-08)
Versions / Conformance levels
- TIFF/IT-FP (Final page data)
- TIFF/IT-CT (Colour continuous-tone picture image data)
- TIFF/IT-LW (Color line-art image data)
- TIFF/IT-HC (High-resolution continuous-tone image data)
- TIFF/IT-MP (Monochrome continuous-tone picture image data)
- TIFF/IT-BP (Binary Picture image data)
- TIFF/IT-BL (Binary line-art image data)
- TIFF/IT-SD (Screened data image data)
Metadata tags
- http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/TIFF_Metadata_Final.pdf
- http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/content/tiff_tags.shtml
Compression
Tag 259 indicates the image compression scheme, as a coded integer. Some of the defined compression schemes are listed below.
- 1 = uncompressed
- 2 = 1-dimensional CCITT Group 3
- 3 = 1- or 2-dimensional CCITT Group 3
- 4 = CCITT Group 4
- 5 = LZW
- 6, 7 = JPEG
- 8, 32946 = DEFLATE
- 32773 = PackBits
- 34661 = JBIG
- 34712 = JPEG2000
Related formats
Tag 32932 contains TIFF annotation data.
Tag 33723 contains IPTC data.
Tag 34377 contains Photoshop Image Resources.
Tag 34665 (and possibly also tags 34853 and 40965) points to an Exif directory.
Tag 34675 contains an ICC profile.
Sample images
- 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
