Editing TIFF (section)

==History==
TIFF was created as an attempt to get desktop [[Image scanner|scanner]] vendors of the mid-1980s to agree on a common scanned image file format, in place of a multitude of [[proprietary format]]s. In the beginning, TIFF was only a [[binary image]] format (only two possible values for each pixel), because that was all that desktop scanners could handle. As scanners became more powerful, and as desktop computer disk space became more plentiful, TIFF grew to accommodate [[grayscale]] images, then color images. Today, TIFF, along with [[JPEG]] and [[PNG]], is a popular format for [[Deep color|deep-color]] images.

The first version of the TIFF specification was published by the [[Aldus Corporation]] in the autumn of 1986 after two major earlier draft releases. It can be labeled as Revision 3.0. It was published after a series of meetings with various scanner manufacturers and software developers. In April 1987 Revision 4.0 was released and it contained mostly minor enhancements. In October 1988 Revision 5.0 was released and it added support for palette color images and [[Lempel–Ziv–Welch|LZW compression]].<ref name="tiff6">[https://www.itu.int/itudoc/itu-t/com16/tiff-fx/docs/tiff6.pdf TIFF Revision 6.0 Final — June 3, 1992], Retrieved on 2024-03-29</ref>

TIFF is a complex format, defining many tags of which typically only a few are used in each file. This led to implementations supporting many varying subsets of the format, a situation that gave rise to the joke that TIFF stands for ''Thousands of Incompatible File Formats''.<ref name="trauth">{{cite book
|title=MATLAB Recipes For Earth Sciences
|last=Trauth
|first=Martin H.
|publisher=Springer
|year=2006
|isbn=3-540-27983-0
|page=198
}}</ref> This problem was addressed in revision 6.0<ref name="tiff6" /> of the TIFF specification (June 1992) by introducing a distinction between ''Baseline TIFF'' (which all implementations were required to support) and ''TIFF Extensions'' (which are optional). Additional extensions are defined in two supplements to the specification which were published in September 1995<ref name="supplement1"/> and March 2002<ref name="supplement2">[https://web.archive.org/web/20120111100404/http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/tiff/TIFFphotoshop.pdf TIFF Specification Supplement 2], Retrieved 2022-06-29</ref> respectively.