computer science

TIFF

TIFF is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand TIFF rather than just read about it. In short: Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition, image manipulation, desktop publishing, and page-layout applications.

Key takeaways

TIFF belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect TIFF to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of TIFF from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition, image manipulation, desktop publishing, and page-layout applications. The format was created by Stephen Carlsen, an engineer at Aldus Corporation, for use in desktop publishing. It published the latest version 6.0 in 1992, subsequently updated with an Adobe Systems copyright after the latter acquired Aldus in 1994. Several Aldus or Adobe technical notes have been published with minor extensions to the format, and several specifications have been based on TIFF 6.0, including TIFF/EP (ISO 12234-2), TIFF/IT (ISO 12639), TIFF-F (RFC 2306) and TIFF-FX (RFC 3949).

History TIFF was created as an attempt to get desktop scanner vendors of the mid-1980s to agree on a common scanned image file format, in place of a multitude of proprietary formats. Carlsen's three objectives were:

Implement import and printing of "basic" bitmapped images, like MacPaint files. Implement import and printing of higher-resolution images, coming from scanners. Define and promote an industry standard for storing and processing scanned images, so that Aldus would not have to write import filters for every model of every scanner entering the budding desktop scanner market. In the beginning, TIFF was only a binary image format (only two possible values for each pixel), because that was all that desktop scanners could handle. As scanners became more powerful, and as desktop computer disk space became more plentiful, TIFF grew to accommodate grayscale images, then color images. Today, TIFF, along with JPEG and PNG, is a popular format for deep-color images. The first version of the TIFF specification was published by the Aldus Corporation in the autumn of 1986 after two major earlier draft releases. It can be labeled as Revision 3.0. It was published after a series of meetings with various scanner manufacturers and software developers. In April 1987 Revision 4.0 was released and it contained mostly minor enhancements. In October 1988 Revision 5.0 was released and it added support for palette color images and LZW compression. TIFF is a complex format, defining many tags of which typically only a few are used in each file. This led to implementations supporting many varying subsets of the format, a situation that gave rise to the joke that TIFF stands for Thousands of Incompatible File Formats. This problem was addressed in revision 6.0 of the TIFF specification (June 1992) by introducing a distinction between Baseline TIFF (which all implementations were required to support) and TIFF Extensions (which are optional). Additional extensions are defined in two supplements to the specification which were published in September 1995 and March 2002 respectively.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with TIFF

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what TIFF claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to TIFF before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about TIFF ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of TIFF

In research: TIFF appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses TIFF in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: TIFF is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Adobe Inc., Computer-related introductions in 1986, High dynamic range file formats, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for TIFF outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study TIFF in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what TIFF means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain TIFF out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is TIFF in simple terms?

Why does TIFF matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study TIFF?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on TIFF.