What Is TIFF? Tagged Image File Format Explained

TIFF (Tag Image File Format) is a flexible, high-fidelity raster format created by Aldus Corporation (now Adobe) in 1986. It is the de facto standard for archival photography, professional print workflows, and scanned document storage, prized for its lossless quality and extensive metadata support.

Lossless by Default

Uncompressed TIFF stores every pixel exactly as captured, with no lossy compression artefacts. This makes it ideal for master files that will be edited multiple times- Unlike JPEG, re-saving a TIFF does not degrade quality. The tradeoff is large file sizes: an uncompressed 24-bit TIFF for a 12-megapixel image is around 34 MB.

LZW Compression

TIFF supports optional LZW compression (Lempel–Ziv–Welch), which is lossless and typically reduces file sizes by 30–60% depending on image content. LZW-compressed TIFFs decode to the exact original pixels- No quality is lost. Most professional software (Photoshop, GIMP, Lightroom) reads and writes LZW TIFF without issues.

Colour Depth Options

  • 8-bit per channel -16.7 million colours; standard for most photography workflows
  • 16-bit per channel -281 trillion colours; used in high-end retouching and scientific imaging where gradients must be edited without banding
  • 32-bit floating point - Used in HDR compositing and CGI pipelines

Multi-Page TIFF

TIFF supports storing multiple images (pages) in a single file- This is widely used for multi-page faxes and scanned documents. jpg.now's current converter produces single-page TIFFs; multi-page TIFF output is on the feature roadmap.

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