Problem with Tifs

BobHill

Nov 18, 2003

Beverly,

Although I’m not a MAC user, this sounds like some of your TIFF images MAY be compressed (LZW compression) and your slide show program doesn’t do compressed TIFFs. Also the TIFF format uses many types of LZW compression techniques (there are over 50 of them) and since they are copyrighted, one reader won’t recognize them all. Could this be your problem?

Bob

Mark_Reibman

Nov 18, 2003

Beverly,

I’m not understanding from your post how this relates to the functions of Photoshop Elements. I’m not familiar with Still Life. I do know that many of us who upgraded to Panther are unable to use the email function of PSE.

Jim_Hess

Nov 18, 2003

Whenever you start working with TIF files, you introduce a number of different factors that can present a problem for some viewers. There are different compression techniques that are sometimes used, and some of these techniques may not be compatible with the viewer. I don’t think you will gain anything by trying to convert photos to TIF format for viewing on a computer. The main advantage to using the TIF format would be for creating high-resolution, uncompressed files for high-definition printing. If I’m preparing a bunch of pictures to be viewed on a computer, I almost always leave them in JPEG format.

Barbara_Brundage

Nov 18, 2003

Beverly, I don’t think TIFF files can show up in mail as inline attachments if that’s what you mean–you need jpgs for that. Tiffs might work but you’d need to wait a reaaallllly long time for files that large, and I doubt mail is designed to display them. You would need to send them as attachments.

If your problem is mailing attachments, well, that’s a whole other can of worms.

Redmondite

Nov 19, 2003

1. Compressed TIFF’s wont show up in a "thumbnail" type viewer. As others
have mentioned there isn’t a single compression standard. So you’ll either get nothing or a black rectangle.

2. The reason the open and export worked is almost certainly because the exported copy was not compressed. I’ve had the problem when going from MS’s DIS 9 to PE. DIS 9 by default compresses TIFF files. PE will open them ok but I can’t see thumbnails. So after I open it in PE I have to do a save as and uncheck the compression option. Haven’t used DIS 9 enough to find a place to turn off compression but there must be one. Then again it’s MS software so maybe there isn’t.

3. TIFF’s (even compressed) are too big for email in most cases. The MTA’s (Mail Transfer Agents) that relay your email around the Internet ’til it reaches it’s destination each have their own characteristics. One of them is a maximum message size. If you exceed that size the MTA will either throw the message away, truncate it, or split it into several messages. If it’s split your recipient had better have a mail server (or email client) that can reconstruct the original otherwise it’s just a collection of electronic sawdust.

wrote in message

Photos saved in tif format do not show up in a slideshow program, Still

Life or in Apple’s Mail program. I have OS X Panther. Message window in Mail is a big blank space but it does send and the receiver can download the picture and it does open. The Still Life slideshow program shows some of these tifs but not others for some reason. The pictures are not there and just black.

Apple tech had me open one of these same pictures in Preview and then

export it as a tif and it works. Is there an incompatibility with Panther somehow?

Thanks.
Beverly

Beverly_Skalisky

Dec 3, 2003

Thanks for all the replies. The tif pictures are not compressed and it is strange that some tifs work and other do not even though they are similiar size, etc.

The reason I want them in tif format is that I want to archive a lot of family pictures. To use them in this particular slideshow program, Still Life, I don’t want to have to convert all the ones for the slideshow to jpg.

Granted Software who makes Still Life asked me to send them a tif to see why it would not work and that is how I discovered the problem that the picture does not show up in Mail but it does attach to the message.

Granted sent this back – from the message they have in the Apple log:

"2003-11-18 11:56:24.170 Mail[3985] Warning: TIFF image with unknown extra samples assumed to have unassociated alpha. RGB values have been premultiplied. Use tiffutil -cat to fix.
2003-11-18 11:57:50.506 Still Life[17845] Warning: TIFF image with unknown extra samples assumed to have unassociated alpha. RGB values have been premultiplied. Use tiffutil -cat to fix."

Does anyone know what "tiffutil -cat to fix means"?

Apple suggested opening the pictures in Preview and resaving and then they do work but why would they not work when saved from Photoshop Elements?

Thanks again for the help.
Beverly

Beth_Haney

Dec 3, 2003

Are any of these TIFFs saved with layers?

Redmondite

Dec 3, 2003

tiffutil -cat looks like a Linux/Unix command line program. There may be a Mac and/or PC version – do a web search on it. What it probably does is throw away the extraneous data.

You might get the same effect by saving the TIFF as a PSD and then opening the PSD and saving it as a TIFF.

wrote in message

Thanks for all the replies. The tif pictures are not compressed and it is

strange that some tifs work and other do not even though they are similiar size, etc.

The reason I want them in tif format is that I want to archive a lot of

family pictures. To use them in this particular slideshow program, Still Life, I don’t want to have to convert all the ones for the slideshow to jpg.

Granted Software who makes Still Life asked me to send them a tif to see

why it would not work and that is how I discovered the problem that the picture does not show up in Mail but it does attach to the message.

Granted sent this back – from the message they have in the Apple log:
"2003-11-18 11:56:24.170 Mail[3985] Warning: TIFF image with unknown extra

samples assumed to have unassociated alpha. RGB values have been premultiplied. Use tiffutil -cat to fix.

2003-11-18 11:57:50.506 Still Life[17845] Warning: TIFF image with unknown

extra samples assumed to have unassociated alpha. RGB values have been premultiplied. Use tiffutil -cat to fix."

Does anyone know what "tiffutil -cat to fix means"?
Apple suggested opening the pictures in Preview and resaving and then they

do work but why would they not work when saved from Photoshop Elements?

Thanks again for the help.
Beverly

Lou_M

Dec 4, 2003

"Use tiffutill -cat to fix" means you must convert/fix the file by using an (eek!) command line utility. Let’s say you have a file named MyFile.tif, then open up the Terminal application (in your Applications/Utilities folder) and type

tiffutil -cat MyFile.tif -out MyFile2.tif

and press Return (or Enter). This will run the program named "tiffutil", pass in your MyFile.tif file, and it will create an output file named MyFile2.tif.

This is probably a lot more complicated than you wanted to do! If, however, you are a masochist 🙂 and like the command line, you can go back into Terminal and type "man tiffutil" without the quotes to get more information on tiffutil.

Beth_Haney

Dec 4, 2003

Nice sleuthing, Lou! Personally, I’ll be staying away from that one! 🙂

I’m still suspicious about some of those TIFFs displaying properly in the slideshow and others showing up as black rectangles. That kind of inconsistency is leading me toward the idea the image might be layered, and the slideshow software isn’t picking up the whole thing.

Beverly_Skalisky

Dec 18, 2003

Thanks for the input. I just opened one of the tifs that does not work and it does not have layers. I checked the Layer Menu and it is greyed out.

I don’t think I want to mess with Terminal either. Strange that this would happen. Beverly

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