PAL2RGB(1)

📦
version 4.7.2 · 16 versions
, in fedora 43, fedora 44

✨ PAL2RGB 💅

okay bestie, so this is a page from the LibTIFF manual set, section 1 — the PAL2RGB(1) one — and it's about a lil program called pal2rgb. it's giving "quiet little utility that does one thing perfectly." we love that for it. 🎀

🌸 NAME 🌸

pal2rgb — convert a palette color TIFF image to a full color image

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

pal2rgb [ options ] input.tif output.tif

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so basically, pal2rgb takes a palette color image and turns it into a full color image. the way it does that is by applying the colormap of the palette image to each sample, and that's what generates a full color RGB image. iconic behavior honestly. ✨

👑 OPTIONS 👑

🔍 Options that affect the interpretation of input data are:

  • -C numentries — this one overrides pal2rgb's default behavior when it's figuring out whether colormap entries contain 16-bit or 8-bit values. by default it inspects the colormap, and if it doesn't find any colormap entry greater than 255, it assumes the colormap only has 8-bit values; otherwise it assumes 16-bit values (which, fyi, is what the TIFF specification requires). so -C lets you explicitly state the number of bits for colormap entries: -C 8 for 8-bit values, -C 16 for 16-bit values. no guessing games, periodt. 💅

🎨 Options that affect the output file format are:

  • -p planarconfig — explicitly pick the planar configuration used to organize data samples in the output image: -p contig for samples packed contiguously, and -p separate for samples stored separately. by default, samples are packed. contig girlies rise 🫶
  • -c compress — use the specified compression algorithm to encode the image data in the output file: -c packbits for Macintosh Packbits, -c lzw for Lempel-Ziv & Welch, -c zip for Deflate, -c none for no compression. and if you don't specify any compression-related option at all? then the input file's compression algorithm is used. lowkey generous of it 💜
  • -r striprows — explicitly specify the number of rows in each strip of the output file. if the -r option isn't specified, a number gets selected so that each output strip has approximately 8 kilobytes of data in it. ✨

💀 BUGS 💀

bestie. brace yourself. Only 8-bit images are handled. that's it, that's the whole limitation. 8-bit only. no cap. 😭

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

  • tiffinfo (1)
  • tiffcp (1)
  • tiffmedian (1)
  • libtiff (3tiff)

🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

LibTIFF contributors — the real ones, fr fr 👑

1988-2025, LibTIFF contributors

and that's the whole page bestie, go convert something 🦋💖

so this was LibTIFF, version 4.7, dated Jun 27, 2026 — and honestly? she ate. 💅✨🌸

📦 where this page comes from