TIFFDITHER(1)

💖 TIFFDITHER 💖

okay bestie, welcome to tiffdither from LibTIFF — she's a little command with one job and she does it flawlessly. no cap. let's get into it 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

tiffdither — convert a greyscale TIFF image to bilevel using dithering 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

tiffdither [ options ] input.tif output.tif

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

So here's the tea: tiffdither takes a single channel 8-bit greyscale image and turns it into a bilevel image using Floyd-Steinberg error propagation with thresholding. that's it. that's the whole vibe. she takes your fancy grayscale and gives you the crunchy two-tone look, and she does it properly, not just slapping a hard cutoff on it. 💖

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👑 OPTIONS 👑

• -c compress — pick the compression for the data getting written to your output file. your choices are:
  • none — no compression 🫶
  • packbits — PackBits compression
  • lzw — Lempel-Ziv & Welch compression
  • zip — Deflate compression
  • g3 — CCITT Group 3 (T.4) compression
  • g4 — for CCITT Group 4 (T.6) compression

If you don't say anything, tiffdither will compress the data according to whatever the Compression tag in the source file says. default queen behavior honestly 👑

heads up bestie: the CCITT Group 3 and Group 4 compression algorithms can only be used with bilevel data. no exceptions, she will not budge on this.

Group 3 compression can also be specified together with a few T.4-specific options: 1d for 1-dimensional encoding, 2d for 2-dimensional encoding, and fill to force each encoded scanline to be zero-filled so that the terminating EOL code lies on a byte boundary. You hand these over by appending a :-separated list to the g3 option — like this, for 2D-encoded data with byte-aligned EOL codes:

-c g3:2d:fill

LZW compression can also be specified together with a predictor value. A predictor value of 2 causes each scanline of the output image to undergo horizontal differencing before it is encoded; a value of 1 forces each scanline to be encoded without differencing. LZW-specific options are specified by appending a :-separated list to the lzw option — e.g. this one, for LZW compression with horizontal differencing:

-c lzw:2

• -f — specify the bit fill order to use when writing output data. By default, tiffdither creates a new file with the same fill order as the original. Saying -f lsb2msb forces data to be written with the FillOrder tag set to LSB2MSB, and -f msb2lsb forces data to be written with the FillOrder tag set to MSB2LSB. pick your fighter ⭐
• -r — make each strip have no more than the given number of rows.
• -t — set the threshold value for dithering. By default the threshold value is 128. 🌈

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🧚 NOTES 🧚

The dither algorithm is taken from the tiffmedian program (written by Paul Heckbert). giving credit where credit is due, we love to see it 🫶

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

pal2rgb (1), fax2tiff (1), tiffinfo (1), tiffcp (1), tiff2bw (3tiff)

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🌟 AUTHOR 🌟

LibTIFF contributors 👑

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📜 COPYRIGHT 📜

1988-2025, LibTIFF contributors

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okay that's the whole page bestie, go forth and dither 💅✨ this was TIFFDITHER(1) from LibTIFF, version 4.7, dated Jun 27, 2026 — mwah, love u, bye 🎀🦋💖