TIFF2RGBA(1)

✨ TIFF2RGBA 💅

okay bestie, welcome to the LibTIFF corner of the manual, this one's called tiff2rgba and it's literally the glow-up station for your TIFF files 🎀

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🌸 NAME 🌸

tiff2rgba — convert a TIFF image to RGBA color space 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

tiff2rgba [ options ] input.tif output.tif

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So. tiff2rgba takes a wide variety of TIFF images and turns them into an RGBA TIFF image. It's giving translator energy fr fr — it can translate different color spaces and photometric interpretation into RGBA, it supports alpha blending, and it translates so many different bit depths into a 32bit RGBA image. iconic behavior only 👑

Internally this program is implemented using the TIFFReadRGBAImage() function, and ngl it inherits every limitation of that function too 😭. That includes limited support for > 8 BitsPerSample images, and flaws with some esoteric combinations of BitsPerSample, photometric interpretation, block organization and planar configuration. not the esoteric combos 💀

The generated images are stripped images with four samples per pixel (red, green, blue and alpha) — or, if the -n flag is used, three samples per pixel (red, green, and blue). The resulting images are always planar configuration contiguous. For this reason, this program is a genuinely useful utility for transforming exotic TIFF files into a form ingestible by almost any TIFF supporting software. it's giving universal donor 🫶

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -c — Specify a compression scheme to use when writing image data: -c none for no compression (the default, bestie), -c packbits for the PackBits compression algorithm, -c zip for the Deflate compression algorithm, -c jpeg for the JPEG compression algorithm, and -c lzw for Lempel-Ziv & Welch. pick your fighter 💅
• -r striprows — Write data with a specified number of rows per strip; by default the number of rows/strip is selected so that each strip is approximately 8 kilobytes. she's self-regulating ✨
• -b — Process the image one block (strip/tile) at a time instead of by reading the whole image into memory at once. This may be necessary for very large images on systems with limited RAM. low RAM besties, this one's for you 🙈
• -n — Drop the alpha component from the output file, producing a pure RGB file. Currently this does not work if the -b flag is also in effect. so like… pick one, girl 😭
• -B — Use this value as the background when doing alpha compositing (dropping the alpha component). yes, it's the backdrop for when the alpha gets ghosted 👻
• -M size — Set maximum memory allocation size (in MiB). The default is 256MiB. Set to 0 to disable the limit. no cap, zero means no cap 🧚

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• tiff2bw (1)
• TIFFReadRGBAImage (3tiff)
• libtiff (3tiff)

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💜 AUTHOR 💜

LibTIFF contributors — the collective, the group chat, the squad 🫶

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⭐ COPYRIGHT ⭐

1988-2025, LibTIFF contributors

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okay that's the whole vibe check, go convert something gorgeous 🌸💖

this was TIFF2RGBA(1) from LibTIFF version 4.7, dated Jun 27, 2026 — mwah, no notes, periodt 💅✨