TIFF/Camera Assistance

S

SeaCastle

Member
This isn't specifically my camera, but pictures I'm downloading:

I'm looking at press photos (again, not Disney related) from an organization. The photos provided are in TIFF format. Being the newbie that I am, I zoom in on the photos and I'm like "Wow, these are so pixelated, but the file size is huge!" (4.3 Megs)

I did a little research and found out that TIFF is lossy or lossless compression for photos. However, the only thing I don't know is how to decompress them. Would Photoshop do it, or do you not need a program to do it?

Thanks in advance to all who can help.  ;D
 
Here's one thread on it... I searched 'tiff picture manageable' in google

http://forums.techguy.org/digital-photography-imaging/438988-resize-tiff-file.html

Hope this helps.

At work, we work with TIFFs not being able to open, and we solve that through Microsoft Office Tools Imaging.  BUT, those are documents not opening.  Not offering this as a solution, but maybe there is something else in MS Office Tools to help.
 
I'll toss in what I can.

Tiff is a very generic, non-proprietary format (so lots of software can open the files, unlike a Photoshop file which pretty much needs photoshop application to open it).  As a photographer, I'll often save my files in tiff format rather than photoshop format so I'll be able to access the pictures on future software platforms.

When saving as a tiff, the saver has the option to save it lossless or with varying levels of compression.  File size is not an indicator of quality of pixels, merely that a lot of data has (or not) been saved.

If you have a quality photo editing package, check out the resolution (ppi or dpi) and the height and width of the pixel dimensions.  A file can be really large file size, but have low ppi/dpi if it has reallllly large HxW pixel dimensions and it would look pixelated.

Also, to what degree/level are you zooming in at?  Coz even a super high quality (ppi/dpi, dimension) file will start to look pixelated if you're zooming in to super high levels (300% or higher).

When I entered the world of digital photography, my professor's mantra was always, "you have to know the final output device in order to save the file."  So, files to be displayed on a computer screen/internet don't need to be any better than 72dpi, but if you're going to print it out as fine art print, you want it to be around 300dpi.  Also, for onscreen display, your target is about 700 pixels across, while for printing you want a couple of thousand pixels across to be able to get all the detail and information and such represented in the print.

Once you get the info about the file about it's resolution and dimensions, you'll be able to figure out the general idea of how the image was intended to be used (fine art print, billboard print, on screen display) and then determine if the intended output the saver used was the same intent on how you want to use the image.

 
One more thing...

The history of the file is important as well.  You can downsize an image w/o impacting the image quality, but when you start to try to make it "bigger", you will most likely suffer image quality loss.

So, if the person who gave you the file has gone through and tried to make the file bigger may have caused the image quality loss.  Also, saving as jpg will cause image quality loss.  So, if you open a file, save it as jpg, you will lose some information. Open that jpg and save it as jpg again, you'll get additional loss with each generation of saving as jpg.  Going through several generations of jpg (and therefore several generations of quality loss) and then going, "I'll save it as tiff to retain my image quality." is a lost cause coz by then you've already lost information, saving it as tif won't magically make the information reappear.

 
I'm not sure what happened to these files; I downloaded them from another source. (If you must know, the USACE image gallery.) The resolution of most of them was 1600x1200, but a huge file size.
 
hmmm... can you tell the ppi/dpi of the file?  you may be seeing pixelization of the image simply because there's so much data it's zoomed in to a high level trying to "show" you the file.  it could be big enough in dimensions that even at 100% magnification you're going to see the pixels.  just a thought...

 
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