Free software for manipulating TIFF images?

January 14, 2004 2:35 PM

What's some good, preferably free software for manipulating TIFF images? [more inside]

Some image analysis software I'm using is quite old and not so user friendly. It only works on images in TIFF format, and only in some very specific format of TIFF, otherwise it throws up "Tag errors". The Gimp appears unable to output TIFF images that satisfy it, but the Windows shareware program "Graphic Converter 2003" manages to generate appropriate files, albiet with a watermark that makes all image analysis futile. Although I may have to end up registering Graphic Converter, I'm wondering if there are any free tools for powerfully manipulating the TIFF image format?

posted by Jimbob to computers & internet (6 comments total)

If by "powerfully manipulating TIFF" you mean "converting to TIFF so you can use your ancient software" -- which your description of the problem seems to imply, ImageMagick's "mogrify" command is the gold standard, is easily set up for batch processing, and has some pretty damned potent image manipulation tools of its own.
posted by majick at 2:45 PM on January 14, 2004

Thanks - I was never really sure what ImagMagick was all about, but if you think it will do the job, I'll give it a go.
posted by Jimbob at 3:02 PM on January 14, 2004

Jimbob, I work for a document scanning company and we output most of our images to Tiff format. We have some in-house software that might work for you. How do you want to modify these documents? Are they color Tiff images or regular black and white? Feel free to email me and we can discuss it further, or just keep talking here...
posted by vito90 at 3:47 PM on January 14, 2004

The Gimp appears unable to output TIFF images that satisfy it...

Have you experimented with both "Mac" and "Windows" bit order, and tried it with and without compression?

I'd consider giving imagej a try, if you're interested in a relatively powerful, scriptable, free image processing program.
posted by mr_roboto at 3:57 PM on January 14, 2004

For windows try Irfanview.
posted by stuartmm at 5:29 PM on January 14, 2004

vito90, the format I need the images in appears to be very simple - black and white (ie. 1-bit, I assume), uncompressed. In The Gimp, I tried reducing the colour depth to 2 colours and saving the image as an uncompressed TIFF but it didn't work, and I had similar problems in other pieces of software. The "Rootmap" software either complains bitterly about problems with the TIFF tags, or interprets the image incorrectly and it comes out...kind of mixed up. Thanks people, I will give some of these pieces of software a try - Googling wasn't much help.
posted by Jimbob at 6:02 PM on January 14, 2004