The TIFF format

TIFF or TIF (Tagged Image File Format) is a raster image format standard.
Its structure can describe image data in grayscale, color palette, and in other cases, color in various color spaces.

It is perhaps the most versatile and diverse bitmap format in existence. Its extensible nature and support for numerous data compression schemes allow developers to customize the TIFF format to any peculiar data storage needs.

For more information about the TIFF format, check our blog article on the ORPALIS website.

A brief history

Created in 1986 by Aldus Corporation, the TIFF format was developed based on feedback from scanner manufacturers and software developers. Its main objective was to provide a standard for raster files of scanned images for all scanner suppliers.

Later, it introduced support for grayscale and color.

In 1988 version 5.0 was released with support for color palette images and LZW compression.

The last version of the TIFF format is from 1992 (!) and includes support for CMYK and YCbCr color images, and the JPEG compression method.
In 1994 Adobe Systems acquired Aldus and maintains the specification since.

The GdPicture.NET Document Converter

The GdPicture.NET SDK includes the GdpictureDocumentConverter class, which provides many different methods and properties for document conversion of 100+ document/image formats.

Now, let’s see how to convert any supported format to a .tiff file: