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J
Julian Vrieslander
Inspiring
December 30, 2010
Question

Script to open a multi-image TIFF into a layer stack?

  • December 30, 2010
  • 1 reply
  • 6941 views

I have a colleague who has multi-image TIFF files, each of which contains a series of images of microscopy sections. He needs Photoshop (Mac version) to read these files, and place the multiple images into a stack of layers in one document.  We have found indirect ways of doing this, but they require multiple applications and several steps.  Is it possible to create a Photoshop script that does this directly: opening the multi-image TIFF, parsing the file, and loading the images into layers?  Does such a script already exist?  If not, can you point us toward source code samples that will help us build the script: perhaps snippets for parsing a multi-image TIFF, and initializing a document with multiple layers.

Thank you.

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1 reply

M
Michael_L_Hale
Inspiring
December 30, 2010

Photoshop and Illustrator will only open the first page of a multi-page(image/frame) tiff. InDesign will not open on at all. It seems that the only Adobe app that supports reading multi-page tiffs is Acrobat.

I don't think that you are going to be able to create a Photoshop script to process multi-page tiffs without using some other app to first covert each page into single files or convert to PDF.

Chris Cox
Chris Cox
Legend
January 2, 2011

You are correct that it can't be done with a script.     Some other application would have to parse out each image from the TIFF file.

The problem with having Photoshop do it is the flexibility of TIFF:  each image can have a different size, mode, depth, color profile, etc.  But Photoshop requires that all the layers in a document have the same mode, depth, color profile, etc.  (size could be fudged by moving layers)

While the most common examples are FAX images with the same content on each image, I have plenty of real world examples with mixed content.

I've been trying to find a good way to handle multi-image TIFF files without excessive slowdowns and problems -- and haven't found a good solution yet.

X
xbytor2
Inspiring
January 2, 2011

I would think that making each tiff layer a Smart Object/Layer would be the only reasonable way of importing the more complex cases. The performance might not be ideal, but it would retain all of the original information from the original tiff, if I understand the problem correctly.

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