Tiff File Format

The Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) was created as the industry standard for image file storage and transfer, in order to overcome the problems created by the large number of proprietary image formats that had been developed. Created by Aldus, the rights to the format were originally held by Aldus before the company merged with Adobe, but although Adobe still owns the copyright in the specification, the TIFF format has become a public domain raster file format.

TIFF files were designed to be independent of the operating system and platform on which the file is viewed. The TIFF format has been revised over the years to offer a number of TIFF options, including a range of compression types, such as TIFF Raw Uncompressed, TIFF PackBits, LZW TIFF (using ‘Lempel-Ziv-Welch’ technology), TIFF CCIT Fax 3 & 4, and even TIFF JPEG, or ‘JPEG-in-TIFF’ as it’s also known.

TIFF files need to be sufficiently flexible for use in many different environments. TIFFs are made up of three parts, or ‘structures’ – the first of which is the Image File Header (IFH), which indicates the byte-ordering used in the generation of the TIFF file (to allow for the variation between platforms and their image handling). The second part of the TIFF image file is the Image File Directory (IFD) which indicates and defines the location within the TIFF file of the image data or ‘Directory Entry’ itself, and Multipage TIFF files contain multiple Image File Directories.

Inside the Directory Entry can be found the ‘tags’ from which the TIFF format derives its name. It is these tags which ensure the longevity of the TIFF format as the tags can be updated to prevent obsolescence.

TIFFs can be bi-level (monochrome) called TIFF B, grayscale (called TIFF G), palette colour (called TIFF P), and RGB colour (TIFF R). Then there’s also TIFF X which combines all four colour formats. Often those scanning will only want to store images in the smaller bi-level or grayscale TIFF formats as colour isn’t required for the saved document, which substantially reduces the storage requirement.

TIFF viewers such as Daeja's ViewONE and ViewONE Pro decompress and render the image data within the TIFF files to the screen. ViewONE and ViewONE Pro do so very quickly.

The complexity of the TIFF file (and the subsequent size of TIFFs) means that other image formats specializing in compression with apparent loss of quality are competing with TIFF to be the image format standard for the future.