Tif

[coach]

I got a file e mailed to me. It is in TIF format. How do I get this into part works?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
If it makes any difference, the customer had a drawing scanned to disk and e mailed me that.
T I A
David

[tmerrill]

David,

It should be a bitmap just like a .jpg.

Either use File>Import>Bitmap or the Import Bitmap for Tracing icon.

Tim

[coach]

ahhh, there it is. Thanks Tim.
I traced it with draw a poly line. I have done it that way before with good results.
There has to be a better way though. I tried clicking on fit vectors to bitmap but everything went black. I tried it a few times also the software froze up everytime I tried.
Any ideas?

[shoeshine]

David,

TIF is an uncompressed image format used mainly for photographs going to print where you want no degredation of the pixel data. They take a huge amount of processing power to manipulate. Take it into an image editing software (photoshop or the like) and export a more partworks friendly format like .jpg.

[ssflyer]

Chris is correct - it is probably your graphic card, or drivers. However, if you convert, ,bmp is probably better, since it avoids the evil "jaggies" from jpeg compression, Just my thought,
Rom

[dana_swift]

Chris- TIF is more than one file format with a common extension. Some TIF variants can be compressed. Check out the following document for full details: http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/tiff/TIFF6.pdf
Section 9: PackBits Compression .................................................. .. 42
Section 10: Modified Huffman Compression...................................43
Section 11: CCITT Bilevel Encodings ..............................................49
Section 13: LZW Compression .................................................. .......57
Section 14: Differencing Predictor .................................................. .64
Section 22: JPEG Compression .................................................. .....95
Notice that TIFF can include JPEG directly as defined in section 22.

LZW is the root algorithm behind GIF, and ZIP. Huffman coding is used in FAX, JPG, and ZIP encoding among many others.
TIF files may or may not be compressed. If they are there is a range of lossless or lossy methods to chose from.

Not that it matters when you go to cut it-

D

[shoeshine]

Dana, good to know.

The only time I encounter TIFF files they are of the uncompressed variety for print... otherwise art directors send me .jpg's (which I guess are TIF's as well) why would one use TIFF as a extension with jpeg compression rather than just .jpg?

[robtown]

Tracing a .tif should be no more processor intensive than tracing a .jpg

It's simply processing on a pixel by pixel basis looking for contrast in the colors to define an edge.

What would make a difference is if the image is a high resolution image like 2048 x 1024 vs 800 x 600 ...

[dana_swift]

Chris-

The confusion comes from the JPEG spec, which only specifies a compression technique not a file format. Then somebody designed a file format named JFIF for JPEG File Interchange Format. Since JFIF files contained a JPEG image and PC encouraged 3 character extensions, the JPG extension was used. My hunch is that JFIF would shorten to JIF which most people would confuse with GIF. So they used JPG or spelled out JPEG.

How is that for confusing?
TIFF files are often used for storage of raster images, but they are not limited to that, as they can include JPEG compressed images also.
And just to make things more interesting there is a new format JPEG2000 which has yet another compression scheme totally unrelated to JPEG. (The difference is JPEG uses Discrete Cosine Transform decimation to achieve compression, while JPEG2000 uses Wavelet decimation to achieve compression.) The advantage of JPEG2000 is it does not have those 8x8 box jaggies, but not all decoders support it. Just to keep it fun, it uses the JPG file extension also.

What is real surprising is that more questions dont come up over image formats as its a pretty strange world.

Hope that helps!

D