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.
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.
I've never had a multi-page tiff file to take a look at. (I thought these came from fax devices?). If you wanted the file splitting process to be done invisibly then it 'may' be possible to call the app.system() and use a command line utility like 'imagemagick'… You would have to download and install this then look up the available options in it's man pages. If you have the pages split then you could load into a stack? I've not actually done this myself but it should be possible. I've seen elsewhere that 'bridgetalk' will communicate with Acrobat on the PC but not on the Mac so I think that route is out?
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.
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.
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.
The ability to open other than the first page of a multi-page tiff would be welcome. Even if each page is opened as a separate document. Something similar to the way PDF files are handled now.
Once all the pages of the tiff file where open the user could then choose the colorMode, bitDepth, etc to use if they wanted to combine the pages into one doc as layers. And as Xbytor points out if smart object layers are used there would be no need to convert when combining.
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