Problems reading tif files

Mon Sep 27 21:22:33 EDT 2010

On Sep 26, 9:19 pm, Christian Heimes <li... at cheimes.de> wrote:
> Am 27.09.2010 02:31, schrieb gujax:
>> > Hi,
> > I have read several related e-mails dating back as far as 2006. I am
> > quite confused whether PIL can open tif images. Some posts seem to say
> > there isn't yet any support for PIL while there are few posts where
> > PIL has been able to open tif images. So I guess, I have to ask this
> > probably trivial question again. I am just learning python and PIL. I
> > have tiff images which are 8 bit and 16 bit gray scale images. I
> > cannot open them. Here are the errors that I encounter.
>> PIL only supports a limited subset of TIFF files. Several compression
> algorithms like G3 and G4 fax compression are not supported yet. PIL may
> have a problem with partly broken TIFF files, too.
>> > I have no idea why this happens.
> > I will appreciate a resolution. The file opens with ImageJ and
> > ImageMagick. It is a 8-bit RGB file. I have associated default viewer
> > to be ImageMagick. I am on Lucid Linux, and other programs such as F-
> > spot and Gimp cannot open those files either.
> > I don't yet know how to attach image files to the post so please bear
> > with me till I figure that out.
>> Can you please post the output of tiffinfo for the specific file? It may
> give me a hint what's going wrong.
>> There aren't a lot of good alternatives for image processing in Python.
> I've evaluated most of them and decided to write my own one for my
> employer. It's a Cython based library around FreeImage [1] and LCMS2 [2]
> and works very well. So far we have processed several million TIFF files
> with more than 100 TB of raw data smoothly. I've permission to release
> the software as open source but haven't found time to do a proper release.
>> Christian Heimes
>> [1]http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/
> [2]http://www.littlecms.com/

Thanks Christian,
Here is the tiffinfo:
TIFF Directory at offset 0x8 (8)
 Subfile Type: (0 = 0x0)
 Image Width: 640 Image Length: 480
 Bits/Sample: 32
 Sample Format: IEEE floating point
 Compression Scheme: None
 Photometric Interpretation: min-is-black
 Samples/Pixel: 1
 Rows/Strip: 480
 Planar Configuration: single image plane
 ImageDescription: ImageJ=1.44f
min=0.0
max=255.0
How do I use freeimage with python. Is there a backend?
Can these files be converted to something else such as bmp and then
read out? I should have tried it out before asking you,
Thanks