Office scanners typically offer three or four modes: black-and-white (bilevel), grayscale, color, and sometimes "auto-detect". The choice has order-of-magnitude impact on TIFF file size. TIFF2PDF p…
If you've ever wondered why a scanned 30-page contract is 200 KB while a single phone photo of the same content is 2 MB, the answer is CCITT compression. G3 and G4 — algorithms originally designed …
Most images are RGB — that's what cameras produce, what monitors display, and what the web standardizes on. But two professional contexts use other models: print pre-press uses CMYK (cyan, magenta,…
TIFF's compression tag has dozens of registered values. In practice, only seven or eight are common. The codec used in the source TIFF affects how the conversion handles it and how big the resultin…
Unlike PNG and JPEG (where DPI is largely advisory and often missing or wrong), TIFF treats resolution as a first-class image property. Every well-formed TIFF declares a precise DPI in its tags, an…
TIFF's design philosophy is "extensibility by tag". Anyone can register new tags or compression types; readers that don't know them can ignore them and read the basic image. Over 35 years, this has…
Most TIFFs are scans — pictures of pages, with no real text inside. The PDF that TIFF2PDF produces is the same: visible content but no machine-readable text. Searches return nothing; copy-paste ret…
TIFF is a container format. Inside, an arbitrary number of images can sit side by side — typically pages of a scanned document, but also exposure brackets, animation frames, or thumbnail+main-image…
"TIFF" covers two very different file types. The first is the multi-page bilevel CCITT scan from an office scanner — a 30-page contract is a single 1 MB TIFF. The second is the single 16-bit RGB Ph…