Re: Tiff conversion dilemma

From: Dances With Crows (danSPANceswitTRAPhcrows_at_usa.net)
Date: 10/15/03 

Date: 15 Oct 2003 03:37:35 GMT

On Wed, 15 Oct 2003 03:11:48 GMT, Erik F staggered into the Black Sun
and said:
> Ok. like an idiot, I saved a bunch of images as Tifs using Jpeg
> compression. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I didn't
> realize that it wasn't the most versatile format.

No, it's not. There's already a perfectly good JPEG standard;
encapsulating that within TIFF doesn't do much for you and can cause
massive headaches. Most of the people who use TIFF extensively get all
paranoid about lossy compression, so JPEG-TIFFs are poor ***
stepchildren and very poorly supported.

> Now I'm stuck, as I can't find a way to convert these images back into
> either regular Tifs or Jpgs. The version of Suse I was using back
> then handled them ok, but I'm not using it anymore. "Convert" won't
> do it either.

samantha:~/pics$ convert -compress jpeg unix-extinguisher.jpg test.tif
convert: test.tif: Unknown pseudo-tag 65537. (TIFFSetField).
samantha:~/pics$ convert +compress test.tif test2.tif
Segmentation fault

Whoa. Nasty. test.tif loads fine in Kuickshow though....

samantha:~/pics$ tiffcp -c none test.tif test2.tif

...and test2.tif is a TIFF without any compression at all, which is
inefficient, but anything can handle it. tiffcp is part of the "tiff"
package in Gentoo, it'll probably be in the "tiffutils" package in other
distros, YDistroMV. 

-- 
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin /    mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com     /  "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/    penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL