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Description

The Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) is a raster image format originally developed by the Aldus Corporation, primarily for use in scanning and desktop publishing. When Adobe Systems Incorporated purchased Aldus in 1994, they acquired the rights to the TIFF format and have maintained it since then. TIFF files comprise three sections: an Image File Header (IFH), an Image File Directory (IFD), and the image data. TIFF files can contain multiple images (multi-page TIFF), and each image has a separate IFD. The IFH always appears at the beginning of the file, and is immediately followed by a pointer to the first IFD. The IFD contains metadata which describes the associated image, stored as a series of tags. The IFD also contains a pointer to the actual image data. TIFF supports colour depths from 1 bit to 24 bit (e.g. monochrome to true colour), and a wide range of compression types (RLE, LZW, CCITT Group 3 and Group 4, and JPEG), as well as uncompressed data.