Student: Jenny Petersson
TIFF is the most common format for storing bitmapped images. The format is a standard and has a possibility to compress files and can in that way be memoryefficient.
The first version of the TIFF was published by Aldus Corporation in the
fall of 1986, after a serie of meetings with various scanner manufacturers
and software developers. TIFF describes image data that typically comes
from scanners, frame grabbers and paint- and photoretouching programs. TIFF
is not a printer language or page description language. The purpose of TIFF
is to describe and store raster image data.
TIFF describes bitmapped files, especially scanned pictures. This flexible
standard can be used for pictures that have been made in different computersystems.
For example, TIFF can be used when having pictures exported from Photoshop
to another program.
There are four TIFF image types: bilevel, grayscale, palette-colour and
full-colour images. Though TIFF is a rich format, it can easily be used
for simple scanners and applications as well, because the number of required
fields is small.
The TIFF fileformat describes how the file containing pixelinformation
shall be presented. You can consider it as an envelope on which identifications
and recommendations are marked and they show how to open the envelope. If
you follow the procedure closely you will reach the stored pixels inside
the envelope.
A TIFF-file consists of three major parts. First a short filehead, then
there are a list of all fields within the file. Finally data within the
fields.
In a TIFF-file there can be subfiles. One application of subfiles are to
store the pictures in doubles:
Subfile type 1 describes the picture in full resolution.
Subfile type 2 contains the low resoluted picture.
The second is used when you load down the picture on a screen where high
resolution is redundant. TIFF can handle several compression algoritmes.
The size of a TIFF-file is maximized to four (4) Gbyte which is enough in
most cases.
TIFF will be enhanced on continuing basis as new imaging needs arise. A
high priority has been given to design TIFF so that future enhancements
can be added without causing unnecessary hardships to developers.
Högrekurs infrastruktur & teknik 1994/95 - meny
This page: http://www.gt.kth.se/doc/format/TIFF.html
Last modified: 14 dec 1995 by Jenny Petersson, m91_pey@m.kth.se