DOKK / manpages / debian 10 / libtiff-tools / raw2tiff.1.en
RAW2TIFF(1) General Commands Manual RAW2TIFF(1)

raw2tiff - create a TIFF file from a raw data

raw2tiff [ options ] input.raw output.tif

raw2tiff converts a raw byte sequence into TIFF. By default, the TIFF image is created with data samples packed (PlanarConfiguration=1), compressed with the PackBits algorithm (Compression=32773), and with each strip no more than 8 kilobytes. These characteristics can overridden, or explicitly specified with the options described below.

size of input image file header in bytes (0 by default). This amount of data just will be skipped from the start of file while reading.
width of input image in pixels (can be guessed, see GUESSING THE IMAGE GEOMETRY below).
length of input image in lines (can be guessed, see GUESSING THE IMAGE GEOMETRY below).
number of bands in input image (1 by default).
type of samples in input image, where data_type may be:
byte 8-bit unsigned integer (default),
short 16-bit unsigned integer,
long 32-bit unsigned integer,
sbyte 8-bit signed integer,
sshort 16-bit signed integer,
slong 32-bit signed integer,
float 32-bit IEEE floating point,
double 64-bit IEEE floating point.
type of samples interleaving in input image, where config may be:
pixel pixel interleaved data (default),
band band interleaved data.
photometric interpretation (color space) of the input image, where photo may be:
miniswhite white color represented with 0 value,
minisblack black color represented with 0 value (default),
rgb image has RGB color model,
cmyk image has CMYK (separated) color model,
ycbcr image has YCbCr color model,
cielab image has CIE L*a*b color model,
icclab image has ICC L*a*b color model,
itulab image has ITU L*a*b color model.
swap bytes fetched from the input file.
input data has LSB2MSB bit order (default).
input data has MSB2LSB bit order.
Specify a compression scheme to use when writing image data: -c none for no compression, -c packbits for the PackBits compression algorithm (the default), -c jpeg for the baseline JPEG compression algorithm, -c zip for the Deflate compression algorithm, and -c lzw for Lempel-Ziv & Welch.
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.

raw2tiff can guess image width and height in case one or both of these parameters are not specified. If you omit one of those parameters, the complementary one will be calculated based on the file size (taking into account header size, number of bands and data type). If you omit both parameters, the statistical approach will be used. Utility will compute correlation coefficient between two lines at the image center using several appropriate line sizes and the highest absolute value of the coefficient will indicate the right line size. That is why you should be cautious with the very large images, because guessing process may take a while (depending on your system performance). Of course, the utility can't guess the header size, number of bands and data type, so it should be specified manually. If you don't know anything about your image, just try with the several combinations of those options.

There is no magic, it is just a mathematical statistics, so it can be wrong in some cases. But for most ordinary images guessing method will work fine.

pal2rgb(1), tiffinfo(1), tiffcp(1), tiffmedian(1), libtiff(3)

Libtiff library home page: http://www.simplesystems.org/libtiff/

November 2, 2005 libtiff