Hey, all.. I was wondering if anyone knew of any weird issues surrounding the TIFFs output by Poser 4.03 (this may apply to other versions, I dunno). Seems something is wonky with the file format. Here's the issue: Using ImageMagick 5.2.9, either scripted in Perl or using the command line interface, I get a weird result ANY TIME I open a Poser TIFF and write it, either still as a TIFF or as some othe file format. This issue doesn't arise with TIFFs generated by Photoshop 5.5. As a matter of fact, if I open a Poser TIFF and resave it in Photoshop 5.5, it's not broken. Only if the image is a straight Poser-generated TIFF does this happen. I'll post a JPEG conversion of the results of one of these. For those who don't know, ImageMagick is a sort of command-line Photoshop, available free from www.imagemagick.org. IM is able to do all sorts of conversions, filter effects, montages, create animated GIFs and MPEGs, and so on. The main use for it, of course, is in scripting -- for instance, you can batch convert 100 TIFFs to 91x91 PNGs in a minute or so, hands free. Scripting also applies to web scripting, and on my site that I'm building -- www.xfx3d.com -- I'm building the forums system and I want it to go a little further than the one you're in right now, so rather than printing an error message if your image is too big, I resize it to not too big automatically, and it goes up fine. Likewise the file format -- I have to wait for the upload whether I give you an error emssage or not, so why not just convert the image, and since ImageMagick using the Perl API can easily load in and convert an image from TIFF or Photoshop or AIFF or IFF or Targa or whatever into any other format except AOL Art, basically, I should be nice and allow uploads of all sorts of files and just tuirn anything that's not a JPEG, GIF or PNG into a JPEG automatically, right? Except that TIFF output is one fo the most common outputs from Poser, and people would probably like to just upload TIFFs from Poser without having to convert them themselves, and for some reason it's not handling Poser 4 TIFFs (and maybe other versions) and doing the weird thing you see above. Again, let me reinforce, TIFFs output by other programs are NOT doing this, only TIFFs I have created with Poser. Of course, the TIFFs are fine if I open them with other things, but ImageMagick is pretty picky on the file format being correct (it grumbles about Photoshop ones but doens't mess them up like this).

http://www.xfx3d.com/forum2/read.cgi?message=11 shows the messed up TIFF that was uploaded straight from Poser's output, converted to JPEG. http://www.xfx3d.com/forum2/read.cgi?message=12 shows the other one, that is the EXACT same file, except it was opened and re-saved in Photoshop first, and again converted by the Forum to JPEG. Bye the way, don't mind the forums being so ugly right now -- when they are done they won't be. It's the whole code for function, add beauty later thing.

Attached Link: http://home.earthlink.net/~ritter/tiff/

"It is very easy to write a TIFF-writer, but very difficult to write a fully TIFF compliant reader." - quote from the Unofficial TIFF Home Page, link as above. Unfortunately the link they give to a TIFF test page is broken; but there are some referenced at http://www.libtiff.org/images.html which might help to pinpoint the problem.

Thanks. Hrm. I think what I need is the opposite, though --not a set of test TIFFs, but a TIFF tester that will say anything nonstandard in the TIFF uploaded. Hrm. Hey, Little_Dragon! Do you know where one is?

Attached Link: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/engfl.html

Poser supposedly saves in uncompressed tif format, but I don't know why that would be a problem. I tried opening a Poser Created tif in Corel PhotoPaint 8, ACDSee, Irfanview and a VB application using the GFL SDK for image loading. All of them worked fine. If you don't find a solution to the issue with Image Magick, you might look at GFL (link). They don't list a Perl interface, though they do support ASP. I don't use Perl so I don't know how difficult it would be for you to use. PaintX is another free image library you might look at as well (http://www.paintlib.de/paintlib/). I saw an Image Magick bug list that mentioned problems with variations of the tif format though not exactly what you are describing. That would be the first place to look, if you haven't already. I don't think most people are going to be uploading tif files anyway. JPG, GIF and PNG are the formats folks are accustomed to using on the web anyway and even if tif worked, the extra size means that most people would probably stick to jpg, especially since it's going to be converted to jpg anyway. In short, while its a neat feature, I don't see it as a real compelling need for a site. The resizing is a great idea and if you can pull that off for jpg, png and gif then I think that's probably enough. Just my opinion anyway :-)

In short, while its a neat feature, I don't see it as a real compelling need for a site. I know, but it's one of those things where I decided I wanted to do it and was daunted by output from the specific program I'll be supporting most. Most people will want to post JPEGs and PNGs. Fact is, I can easily support other filetypes, but it's the Poser ones specifically. Moreover, I'm not a fan of error messages. I don't want to display a 'Your image is on the wrong file format' message, when I can just take care of that. It's a UI thing in the end. Plus, I'm a stubborn bastard, and I decided I wanted to do this. I can't give in now. Heh. If it were any other sort of site, I'd just include a message in the FAQ explaining that Poser TIFFs don't work right. But since it caters mostly to Poser people, well, I can't really do that and not look stupid. But I don't want to put an error message in either. I suppose I can restrict TIFFs to download only, and leave them TIFFs, but I really liked the auto-convert idea. Besides, leaving them TIFFs would take up too much space and bandwidth as TIFFs are that much bigger. sigh The resizeration feature already works nicely. It took a little bit of trial and eror, of course, but I got it solid (see earlier messages in the proto- xfx3d.com thread -- but don't distribute the pictures, as they are there for testing purposes only and the thread will be deleted before anything goes live. Go download them from Alex Ross's website instead B^) I'm gonna get Tecnblack (my official installer and security guy) to update the libraries, maybe that will fix it. They are probably out of date since IM was installed in 2000 and I think the TIFF libs are the ones that come with Slackware 7 by default, so they could possibly be older than god.

You might want to try netpbm, which is also a free command line image editing package. I just tried it, it can handle Poser's TIFF files just fine. I wonder if it's ImageMagick's fault. In all the other programs I tried, Poser's images open just fine.

I just downloaded ImageMagick 5.5.1 10/15/02 Q16 and tried converting a Poser-saved TIFF file using $convert Untitled.tif Untitled.jpg and the image turned out just fine. What version of ImageMagick are you using?

I have 5.2.9 -- BTW, it's on Linux (Slackware 7) so if you're using Windows or Mac, the libraries aren't gonna be the same, either. Although with a $ as your prompt I'm guessing you're not on a Win or Mac. Tecn says he'll do the update tomorrow night, so I'll see if that works. He's gonna update both the TIFF lib and the IM itself. I'm crossing my fingers. If all else fails, I'll install some other converter and use it to deal with TIFF files only and specifically. That should be rare enough to not have much problems with the extra load of launching a shell utility in the background for a second or two. Some logic like:

if the image format is a tiff
    discard the opened image handle
    write the original blob upload to temp
    run the external converter to make it a JPEG (or perhaps PNG to keep the alpha/matte intact)
    reopen a new image handle from that image

And do that before any size conversion takes place or anything, of course.

I was trying that on MacOS X, but the libraries should be the same as it's a straight port of the Unix version (I am using the fink distribution, which is comparable to Debian for Linux). I just took a look at the changelog of ImageMagick and found this: 2001-10-18 Cristy * Eliminated the libMagick.so dependancy on libtiff by moving Huffman2DEncodeImage() from magick/compress.c to coders/pdf.c, coders/ps2.c and coders/ps3.c (suggested by Bob Friesenhahn). This change has the side-effect of elminating dependency on libpng and libjpeg as well (which libtiff may depend on). If your version is older than that, our versions are using different libraries for TIFF files.

Sharp eye, and I do believe it is older than that. I think the update might just do the trick, then!

"Plus, I'm a stubborn bastard, and I decided I wanted to do this. I can't give in now. Heh." Yeah, been there before. I call it the Captain Ahab Syndrome :-)