Digital BW, The Print

>> From: Wendel White
>> 
>> The point was not that .TIF and .RAW are the same, it's that some camera
>> companies gave the RAW files a .TIF extension. My Canon 1Ds saves
>> RAW files as .TIF even though they are not really TIFF files.
> 
> Actually, they probably are TIFF files, just not the kind most software
> expects. TIFF is a packaging format for image data, and can encapsulate
> anything including proprietary data. In that respect, it's like AVI for
> video files. You can wrap JPEG compressed data in a TIFF file if you want.
> And indeed, the new Adobe DNG format is a TIFF file. It's just that the most
> common use of TIFF is to wrap uncompressed or losslessly compressed image
> data, so that's all most software supports.
> 
> --
> 
> Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
> Paul                mailto:pderocco@...

Except that the TIFF part is a 288x192 pixel preview image which is
essentially useless. The rest of the 11 megapixel image must be opened by a
RAW converter, so while you are right that there likely is TIFF data, the
real image is not accessible as a generic TIFF or limited by the nature of
TIFF images as Dennis' the statement implied. It seemed to me that Dennis
did not understand Claude's point about the use of the TIFF extension for
RAW files. I fully understand your point (though I know very little about
how it is done) but at least the DNG file uses .DNG so as not to confuse the
file with a regular TIFF.

Wendel