TIFF Icon

TIFF Icon

TIFF

Photopedia

11 July 2008 09:50

TIFF (Tagged-Image File Format) files are an extremely versatile file format that are popular among both photographers and designers. This is because they are supported by nearly all image-editing and desktop publishing (DTP) applications and can also be inserted into word processing documents.

Unlike JPEGs, TIFFs are a lossless format so no matter how many times you save or copy them, your image won’t degrade. This comes of the expense of file size which is considerably larger than a JPEG. However, one way to combat this size issue is to save TIFFs using LZW (Lemple-Zif-Welch) Lossless compression. This is an option in the Save As dialogue. LZW won’t compress images down to the size of a JPEG but it will improve file size.

TIFFs are perfect for work in progress because the support many Photoshop features including; layers, alpha channels, paths and all the elements that can be saved in a Photoshop Document (PSD). Not only this, they have a maximum size of 4GB, they support CMYK, RGB, Lab, Indexed Color, and Grayscale images. All in bit depths of 8, 16, or 32 bits per channel.