What is a TIFF (.tif)?
According to the folks at Adobe: TIFF is a tag-based image file format that is designed to promote the interchange of digital image data. The TIFF format originated in 1986 when Aldus Corporation and leading scanner vendors worked together to create a standard file format for images used in desktop publishing. The first version of the specification was published in July, 1986. Version 5.0 of the specification was completed in August, 1988. TIFF supports color depths up to 24-bit, or 32-bit CMYK color, allows transparency in some color depths, supports a variety of compression schemes, and allows for thumbnail images and indexing text. TIFF tries to do just about everything you, or anyone else, could want an image format to do. As a result, the spec is very complex, and many programs will render only some TIFFs successfully. Even Adobe Photoshop can’t read TIFF images which use a particular type of compression (group 4 compression).
