What's new

What do you use a 9.48MB "TIFF" for??? (1 Viewer)

LanceJ

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Oct 26, 2002
Messages
3,168
I was poking around the Hubble Site looking at their photos (duh) and keep coming across humongous image files like these. Are these files for scientists to use? Because it seems like one could enlarge something like this into a wall-size image & still have it look good (ever since seeing a similar mega-poster of the moon's surface while on a tour of the Johnson Space Center in the 80s I have been trying to buy something similar for my listening room).

And what exactly is a TIFF file anyway?

Thanks.

LJ
 

SethH

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 17, 2003
Messages
2,867
TIFF is a completely raw file. It has no compression at all. You likely could blow a 9.48MB TIFF file up very large, but also remember that it's not compressed at all. If you compressed that same image using the JPEG used in consumer quality digital cameras you're probably looking a a 4MB file (maybe less).
 

Rob Gillespie

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Aug 17, 1998
Messages
3,632
Even though it's 9mb, it's not actually that big at all. 1777x1864 pixels at 72dpi. That's not even the resolution of a 3 megapixel digital camera.

The size, as Seth said above, is purely down to the file format. Saving it in .bmp gives about the same result. .JPG compression reduces file sizes down a lot at the expensive of absolute quality of image. Saving that particular image as .jpg with lowest compression results in a file size of 2.9mb.

I've done true 2400dpi scans of 35mm prints on my Epson scanner and they come it at around 3500x2500 pixels, or 20-25mb in uncompressed .bmp format. I've done photo restoration work from scanned prints and made the mistake of scanning an 8x10 at 2400dpi. The file was so big nothing would actually load it - over 1gb. Even at 300dpi scan the image was still over 300mb in size, though the image quality was beautiful.
 

Scott L

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 29, 2000
Messages
4,457
I heard rumors that the next format after HDTV will be raw TIFF files at 90fps :D
 

David Lawson

Screenwriter
Joined
Sep 11, 2000
Messages
1,365
Location
Cincinnati, OH
Real Name
David Lawson
A TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) can be compressed via the LZW algorithm, but it's lossless (which means there is no loss of quality, unlike JPEG, which uses a lossy compression scheme). Printers and designers use them in desktop publishing applications on a daily basis.

I never use BMP at work, and use JPEG sparingly, since the quality degradation from anything but the least possible compression is glaringly obvious in most cases.
 

Seth_L

Screenwriter
Joined
Apr 5, 2002
Messages
1,553
Tiff files also can be losslessly compressed with built in zip compression. They support color depths up to 64bit, and can support several layers (like Photoshop files).
 

Chris

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jul 4, 1997
Messages
6,788
TIFF files are heavily used in Astronomy. The reason is because some of the pictures you will get have very faint presentations of orange/white/etc. which are culled out if you JPG. So, because of the need for complete accuracy, only lossless formats are used.
 

Bill Slack

Supporting Actor
Joined
Mar 16, 1999
Messages
837
TIFF can use compression. For this use, it's likely a lossless compression or maybe just RAW. The most common you'll see on color images are LZW (same as GIF), Flate (same as PNG), JPEG and uncompressed.

TIFF itself is just a generic container with a fairly extensible set of properties that are allowed, and then contains a data block that can be all sorts of different compression formats...

It's basically impossible to find a 'universal' TIFF viewer because of this.
 

Jeff Ulmer

Senior HTF Member
Deceased Member
Joined
Aug 23, 1998
Messages
5,582
I routinely use files this big (and a lot bigger) in publishing. That is roughly a 4" x 7" image at 300 dpi.
 

Wayne Bundrick

Senior HTF Member
Joined
May 17, 1999
Messages
2,358
I've been impressed with the lossless compression of the PNG format. I think it's good enough that everyone should stop doing JPEG and do PNG instead.

Plus PNG has alpha channel that works. With all other formats (especially TIFF, due to the extensibility that Bill mentioned -- the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from) I've had endless problems getting alpha channel to work properly when saving it in one program and opening it in another. But I've never had a problem with PNG, probably because it has exactly one way to do alpha.
 

Dennis Nicholls

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Oct 5, 1998
Messages
11,396
Location
Boise, ID
Real Name
Dennis


Tell me about it. The US Patent and Trademark Office has millions of documents ONLY available in some sort of TIFF format, due to some damned treaty we signed. Somehow all the patent offices in the world agreed about 10 years ago to standardize on TIFF for drawings...and yet the flavor of TIFF they chose is NOT supported by most viewers. So we have the worst of all possible choices: large files and no cheap viewers. :angry:
 

David Lawson

Screenwriter
Joined
Sep 11, 2000
Messages
1,365
Location
Cincinnati, OH
Real Name
David Lawson
For what it's worth, GraphicConverter for the Mac has been able to open any TIFF I've thrown at it over the years, including government work.
 

Craig F

Second Unit
Joined
Jul 5, 2001
Messages
276
Real Name
Craig
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)
-- or --
TIFF (Thousands of Incompatible File Formats)
:D
 

Bill Slack

Supporting Actor
Joined
Mar 16, 1999
Messages
837
The USPTO uses Group 4 compression, which is the standard for faxes. So anything that can view multi-page faxes should be able to handle them.

Try finding a free TIFF Abic viewer though; it's not really a consumer format, it's only used by IBM's check scanners... but most banks in the US use those scanners.

IBM will sell you the SDK... for ~$50k, to start, iirc.

Oh well, your pain is my gain... All this shit keeps me employed. ;)
 

Gary->dee

Screenwriter
Joined
Feb 14, 2003
Messages
1,923
Well besides Photoshop, my old desktop computer that runs Windows 98 comes with the Kodak picture viewing program and those open .tif files.
 

MarkHastings

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jan 27, 2003
Messages
12,013
TIFF files are mainly used in the print world. The main reason is because they support CMYK instead of RGB. Not many formats can support CMYK, thus TIFF files are great for printers who need exact color separation. Quicktime should support TIFF viewing.
 

Shawn Shultzaberger

Supporting Actor
Joined
Dec 2, 2000
Messages
705
We used to scan 9"x9" aerial color negatives at a 7.5u scan resolution in tiff format. File size was in excess of 2Gb. Amazing detail at that resolution. :D
 

Chris Tsutsui

Screenwriter
Joined
Feb 1, 2002
Messages
1,865
Tiffs are good with QuarkXpress which is the software that graphic design students are learning and is accepted as the "industry" standard.

However, I just use photoshop .PSD, or Illustrator .AI for files I want to get printed if that's the software I used. (in CMYK color mode for printing)

I recently got a $300 HP scanner from somebody that upgraded theirs, and this thing (according to the software) can scan an 8.5"x11" document at 9600DPI. This results in a Tiff File that is estimated to be 24.73 gigs.

Now if that's true... I'd say that scan would be a pretty big TIFF file. I wonder what would happen if I click "accept", hehe.

Oh, a 2400DPI scan of that same size is only 1.5 gigs.

The biggest scan I've done is a scan of putting a fishing rod on the scanning bed and taken a 600DPI scan of the whole rod. I used some nice textures and used some manipulation of the scan to create a fishing spread to commemorate my grandpa the "Fisherman". hehe
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Top