A friend sent me a TIFF which she couldn’t open. Photoshop opened it up with a warning dialog which read "Pixel aspect ratio correction is for preview purposes only. Turn it off for maximum image quality." The image was a ‘simple’ black and white line drawing of a map to a rural home. The image mode was (Bitmap)[scaled]. It was scaled 100% vertically but only 50% horizontally 8.5 x 11 @ 300dpi for printing. Experimentation proved that Image > Pixel Aspect Ratio > Square returned the image to normal although it had been received with a Custom Pixel Aspect Ratio. I changed it to a Grayscale image and printed it just fine.
I can’t believe that the people who sent that image intended it to be so strange and I wondered if anyone would have any idea why a TIFF should come with such strange aspects?
That’s a good idea. The image forwarded to me was a single TIFF so I’m not sure how to ascertain if it had been multi-page originally. My friend just passed along the file. Just now I looked at the file with Get Info and see that the original file was only 28K. This seems incredibly small for a TIFF which, when ‘expanded’, had a print size of 8.5 X 11 @ 300dpi. I do think your idea of fax machine format makes sense but I’ve never run into this before as I don’t fax.
The image forwarded to me was a single TIFF so I’m not sure how to ascertain if it had been multi-page originally. My friend just passed along the file.
If you received it in an e-mail through Mail in OS X; hit Control while clicking on the attachment and select Open Attachment; it will open it and from there you can find out if it was a multi-page tiff.
What’s the difference between using a contextual menu to open the attachment with my default TIFF app (Photoshop) or dropping the file on the Photoshop dock icon? I’m missing something I think.
I didn’t think so either but wanted an out in case I was missing something. I happen to be a serious contextual menu user with a menu of options which beggars the imagination…except when used in specific applications like PS, of course.
I still don’t comprehend how a single TIFF could be a multi-page item.
Lots of programs can produce multi-page documents. Aside from page layout programs of course. Freehand Document comes to mind as does Acrobat/PDF as examples of formats that support multiple pages.
Multi-page tiffs are not uncommon and are used for faxes. I have a couple of Windows applications that can read and create them. There are Mac programs that can write and view them as well.
I understand multi-page documents but not a multi-page document sent as a single TIFF which can be opened by Photoshop, although conceivably I could view a single TIFF which was created from multiple pages in another file format. Perhaps I’m stuck in a semantic quibble loop. Sometimes I’m slow to grasp concepts.
Let me ask this. If I received a multi-page TIFF and opened it in Photoshop what would I see. Multiple pages as separate sections of one larger image? Multiple images?
This question has started me on another quixotic foray into learning. Thanks for the liink you provided.
I found a shareware ($15) TIFF viewer for Mac which is carbonized and thus works in OS X. It showed my ‘strange’ TIFF with proper expansion and is useful for seeing multi-page TIFFs although it won’t work with FaxSTF files which, even though they are FAX files, have a proprietary file format.
Rene, What’s the difference between using a contextual menu to open the attachment with my default TIFF app (Photoshop) or dropping the file on the Photoshop dock icon? I’m missing something I think.
Yes you’re missing something, use the contextual menu to "Open attachment" not "Open attachment with… Photoshop".
If you click "Open attachment", OS X will open that tiff with the OS X Generic Preview application, and from there you click on one of the menu icon at the top (don’t remember which one, I’m not in front of an OS X Computer) that will open a "drawer" will open to the right and you’ll see all of the pages (in thumbnail format) of this multi-page fax. From there you can click on the thumbnail of page 3, let’s say, and it will preview page 3 of the fax for you.
You can "Save As" each pages separately, and open them in Photoshop.
