DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / libtiff-tools / raw2tiff.1.en
RAW2TIFF(1) LibTIFF RAW2TIFF(1)

raw2tiff - create a TIFF file from a raw data file

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).

-b number

number of bands in input image (1 by default).


type of samples in input image, where datatype may be one of:
Data type Description
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 sample interleaving in input image, where config may be one of:
Configuration Description
pixel pixel interleaved data (default)
band band interleaved data.

photometric interpretation (color space) of the input image, where photo may be one of:
Photometric Description
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, -c lzw for Lempel-Ziv & Welch.

raw2tif 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 (3tiff)

LibTIFF contributors

1988-2023, LibTIFF contributors

November 23, 2023 4.5