TIF File Extension
Have a problem opening a .TIF file? We collect information about file formats and can explain what TIF files are. Additionally we recommend software suitable for opening or converting such files.
Have a problem opening a .TIF file? We collect information about file formats and can explain what TIF files are. Additionally we recommend software suitable for opening or converting such files.
The .tif filename extension denotes raster image files in the 'Tagged Image File Format' (TIFF). The short .tif extension is the result of the 8.3 legacy filename convention and means exactly the same as .tiff.
TIF is a device-independent proprietary (Adobe Systems, Inc.) format for RGB/CMYK/indexed raster graphics with color depth ranging from monochrome to 48-bit, up to 64 bits per channel, multiple page and layers support. Several different lossless compression algorithms can be used with TIF such as RLE, LZW, ZIP etc.
A .tif file is a TIFF raster image that can be viewed with any available image viewer, as the TIFF format is generally well supported on all platforms. An image saved in a .tif file does not suffer quality loss (like in JPEG). Optionally, the lossy JPEG-compression can also be used in TIF for smaller file sizes.
TIF image files are widely used in OCR (Optical Character Recognition), scanning, faxing and high-quality raster image processing.