TIFF is short for "Tagged Image File Format". It is designed mainly for incorporating
images into documents. It is very flexible format enabling many kind of
uses.It was developed by Aldus (now Adobe Systems) and Microsoft Corp. "TIFF
is primarily designed for raster data interchange. It's main strengths are
a highly flexible and platform-independent format which is supported by
numerous image processing applications.", taken from the unofficial TIFF home page.
So TIFF contains multiple kind of picture formats,like JPEG and Fax 3 &
4 formats. The header section of TIFF-file contains the information about
the image, like the color space and compression type. Because of the flexibility,
very different level of image quality can be produced with TIFF. It also
means that the header section of image is rather large compared to one format
standards like GIF or JPEG.The latest (20.11.96) TIFF 6.0 specification
is available in PostScript -format. For more story, try this.
Bits/pixel supported:
Color spaces supported:
Compression types supported:
Here are few links to TIFF - pictures: