Few Random Questions

[MattSepeta]

1. We have an artist overseas who had the work scanned at 300dpi and is sending .tifs over to us via email. The Files are huge, 300dpi, and look great but their file size is only around 3MB each... And the kicker... My iMac at work nor at home can open them with neither preview, bridge, PSCS4, etc, yet all the windows based machines at work CAN view them.

It gets worse... If you open it in GIMP on the windows machines then resave as a .tfi again, it expands the file size to about 40MB at which point they DO work on my iMac in Photoshop CS4.

Any ideas? I have never experienced anything like this before?

 

[Designer Dale]

I had this issue in college with a Mac file on a PC. Turned out that the Mac file extension is .tiff while the Windows extension is .tif... Add that extra "f" manually and see it the Mac sees it.

Dale

 

[MattSepeta]

I had this issue in college with a Mac file on a PC. Turned out that the Mac file extension is .tiff while the Windows extension is .tif... Add that extra "f" manually and see it the Mac sees it.

Dale

That was the first thing I tried. I did not recognize a .tif" extension so I added another "f" and it did not help.

The biggest puzzle to me, rather than not being able to open it is the file size mystery.

The scanners sent an email with 3 images attached, all ".tif" and all about 3mb each. When we view them on the windows computers in GIMP it shows as 300dpi, 20" x 10" RGB. Doesn't make any sense how a 300dpi 20" x 10" TIFF is only 3MB. Then when they resave it as a .TIFF again in GIMP, it magically balloons to 50MB or whatever it was... So strange, and a huge pain.

 

[firestarter]

TIFF is a very flexible format, which can support a range of different compression techniques, and also different byte-orders for the data. Not all apps can deal with all combinations of settings.

For line art, the file size doesn't seem too strange. Compression usually works very well for this, as a lot of the picture is just blank space, and gets compressed to almost nothing. I suspect GIMP is probably turning it from 1 bit to 24 bit, and maybe selecting a worse compression standard.

You know that you can get GIMP for the Mac?

 

[Zoreke]

Your images have LZW compression, that's why they are only 3 mb but when you open them they are full size.

Some scanner software doesn't save previews of he images. Try the open as command in PSD and select tiff

The file extensiOn should be lowercase .tif

Good luck