User manual

Phantom Help File386

TIFF (*.tif)

Advantage:

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is one of the most popular and flexible of the current public

domain raster file formats. TIFF is primarily designed for raster data interchange. TIFF's main

strengths are a highly flexible and platform-independent format that is supported by numerous

image processing applications. Since developers of printers, scanners and monitors designed it,

it has a very rich space of information elements for colorimetry calibration, gamut tables, etc.

Such information is also very useful for remote sensing and multi-spectral applications.

Another feature of TIFF that is also useful is the ability to decompose an image by tile rather than

scan lines. This permits much more efficient access to very large imagery, which has been

compressed (since one does not have to decompress an entire scan line).

Disadvantage:

There is no provisions in TIFF for storing vector graphics, text annotation, etc. (although such

items could be easily constructed using TIFF extensions TIFF.). TIFF is based on file-offsets, so

that it is not easily "streamable" in the way JPEG JFIF streams are.

A common complaint of TIFF is rooted in its flexibility. TIFF uses a 4-byte integer file offset to

store image data, with the consequence that a TIFF file cannot have more than 4 Gigabytes of

raster data (and some files have begun to approach this boundary).

LEAD (*.cmp)

The LEAD CMP format was created by LEAD Technologies, Inc., and it utilizes the patented

CMP compression. CMP compression delivers a much smaller file size and better image quality

than other compression techniques.

LEAD JTIF (*.jtf)

Refer to LEAD and JTIF.

LEAD JFIF (*jff)

Refer to LEAD.