TIFFMEDIAN(1)

💖 TIFFMEDIAN 💖

okay bestie, welcome to tiffmedian — it's a LibTIFF page and it is, no cap, the moment your RGB image gets a glow-down into a cute lil palette ✨

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✨ NAME ✨

tiffmedian — apply the median cut algorithm to data in a TIFF file 🎨

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

tiffmedian [ options ] input.tif output.tif

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So here's the vibe: tiffmedian takes an RGB image in input.tif, runs the median cut algorithm on it, and pops out a palette image written to output.tif. Iconic behaviour, honestly.

The generated colormap has 256 entries by default — yes, all of them, we're not being shy 💅

And how does the quantizing happen? Every pixel gets mapped to the closest color values in the colormap. That's it, that's the whole glow-up. Periodt. 💖

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -c — tell it what compression to use for the data written to the output file. Your menu is: -c none for no compression at all, -c packbits for PackBits compression, -c lzw for Lempel-Ziv & Welch compression, and -c zip for Deflate compression. 🗜️

By default, tiffmedian will compress data according to whatever the value of the Compression tag in the source file says. Respecting the original's choices, we love that for it 🫶

Now, LZW compression can be specified together with a predictor value, and this is the part where you lock in 🔥 A predictor value of 2 causes each scanline of the output image to undergo horizontal differencing before it gets encoded; a value of 1 forces each scanline to be encoded without differencing. LZW-specific options get specified by appending a :-separated list to the lzw option — like, for example, -c lzw:2 for LZW compression with horizontal differencing. See? Cute AND precise ✨

• -C — specify the number of entries to use in the generated colormap. (Capital C, bestie, do not confuse her with lowercase -c up there, they are two different girlies 💀) By default all 256 entries/colors are used. 🌈
• -f — apply Floyd-Steinberg dithering before selecting a colormap entry. Dithering before, not after. Okay? Okay 💖
• -r — specify the number of rows (scanlines) in each strip of data written to the output file. By default, tiffmedian attempts to set the rows/strip so that no more than 8 kilobytes of data appear in a strip. Very considerate of it, honestly 👑

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📝 NOTES 📝

This program is derived from Paul Heckbert's median program. Giving credit where credit is due, as we should 💜

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• pal2rgb (1)
• tiffinfo (1)
• tiffcp (1)
• tiffcmp (1)
• libtiff (3tiff),

And also this absolute classic of a paper, if you wanna go full academic main character energy 📚:

• "Color Image Quantization for Frame Buffer Display", Paul Heckbert, SIGGRAPH proceedings, 1982, pp. 297-307.

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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 quantize responsibly 🌸

Version 4.7, dated Jun 27, 2026 — mwah, ty for reading, ily, bye 💋✨🦋