Structure of TIFF images in brief

Among the wide variety of image formats supported by ImageConverter Plus, TIFF probably offers more options for input conversion. When choosing TIFF as an output format, there are several different suggestions offered by our software, i.e. color depth, compression type, byte order, single or multistrip, etc. Although some of them are more likely to be utilized by our advanced users, an average user may still wonder what they mean. Color depth describes the range of colors that a photograph can have. Color depth can render 16 million different colors (something similar to what a human eye can distinguish). Color depth of TIFF images can vary fr om 1 (monochrome) to 64 (true color). Even compressed, TIFF files remain large. There are different types of compression algorithms supported for TIFF images, and we’d better describe them in a separate article. In general, TIFF compression allows decreasing the amount of storage space that TIFF files occupy. The byte order refers to the image structure. There are two types of byte order: big endian and little endian. Big endian describes the order of bytes, where the most significant value comes first. Little endian is the order wh ere less significant bytes are to start with. Reading TIFF files is even harder than writing them. There are issues in the TIFF files themselves. Dealing with single-strip TIFF image, a bitmap is stored in one large block. Multi-strip image means that horizontal blocks of the image are stored together. Tiled image is composed of tiles (similar to the ones in the bathroom). TIFF is usually associated with flexibility, but it’s very complicated as well. ImageConverter Plus offers numerous conversion options for TIFF files, though we advise our non-professional users to stay with default settings.