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I am told to use TIFF format for my raster images (originally I have both JPEG and PNG images) according to the editorial office of the journal I am submitting a research paper to.

I tried ImageMagick to convert those images to TIFF format:

magick mogrify -format tiff *.{jpg,jpeg,png}

However the resulting TIFF image are all relatively large (approximately, 6.5 times bigger in file size compared to their JPEG/PNG counterparts). the following is an example:

# size  filename
# ==================
36K     image01.jpg
232K    image01.tiff
140K    image02.png
232K    image02.tiff

I have no idea if that is inherent to the TIFF format itself or something else.

Could someone please enlighten me?

Giacomo1968
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Amazigh_05
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1 Answers1

9

So I assume your question is “why the hell are TIFF images so huge?”

The answer is relatively simple: They are uncompressed by default. Both JPEG and PNG are compressed image formats with lossy and lossless compression, respectively. When you convert these images to TIFF, you basically “uncompress” them.

If you want to save TIFF images with compression, you can use -compress lzw or -compress zip. It won’t do much and some software may not be able to handle it.

Converting a PNG to TIFF is pointless. You gain nothing (except the additional features of the TIFF image format). You waste some storage space.

Converting a JPEG to TIFF is “fraud”. The quality that was lost when compressing will not return. JPEG artifacts and all will still be there. You waste a lot of storage space.

The advice is probably more along the lines of “work in TIFF until the last minute”, but I disagree with that too. Instead, use your image editor’s native image format. It will also be lossless and support all the important stuff like layers and vector layers and whatnot.

You should also make sure that you do not store intermediary images with lossy compression.

user219095
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