digital photo weirdness

[shmokes]

Some of my photos have started acting really strange.  The thumbnail in Windows Explorer is just a black rectangle.  If I try to open the photos in any program other than Photoshop they simply don't show up.  But if I open them in Photoshop they show up perfectly fine.  However, if I make changes to the photo in photoshop and re-save them the problem persists.  They are .tif files.  Any idea what might cause this?  They have been fine for years, and about 2/3 of the pictures in the folder are still fine.  But about 70 photos are doing exhibiting this strange behavior.

[Bobulus]

I can think of several possibilities...

- Photoshop could be saving them in a .tiff format that windows doesn't like, so any photos you've edited recently are acting like that.
- If you hard drive was currently on the way out, you could be getting random file corruption.

[lilshawn]

try one or more of the following......


.....Delete 'thumbs.db' , a hidden file.

.....Right-click the image file, and choose Refresh thumbnail

.....Try resetting the folders via Folder Options View tab. This should reset the thumbnails assigned for all folders. You can customize the folder views again.

.....Turn off thumbnail caching via Folder Options View tab

[RayB]

tif?!?  Are these photos you took in 1992?

Sorry for the sarcasm, but tif is a bloated ancient format. If you want to save them in a non-lossy format, use 24bit PNG, or even windows BMP is better than TIF. I'd even recommend TGA over TIF, but stock Windows does not show thumbnails for TGA.

Could also be a sub-type of TIF that is no longer "liked" by Windows (did you upgrade to Vista or 7 recently?). I remember TIF has 2 or 3 options, like RLE encoding, etc. Maybe one of those options is no longer supported as standard.

[shmokes]

tif?!?  Are these photos you took in 1992?

You're a decade off, but they are old pics.  2002. 

I did a bit of investigation and all the ones that don't work have a 32-bit color depth and the rest are either 24-bit color or 8-bit black & white.  I upgraded to Windows 7 long ago, but for all I know this problem coincides with the upgrade as these aren't pictures I look at all that frequently.

[saint]

email me one. I have Windows 7.

[RayB]

This might not be the answer you're looking for, but since you have Photoshop, set up a batch job that saves them all into a new format (or saves as 24bit TIF) and you'll be good. Let me know if you need helping doing batch jobs.

[shmokes]

email me one. I have Windows 7.

Done


edit:  Just kidding.  They bounced back, presumably cos they're too large (about 20 MB each or something -- I sent 2).

[shmokes]

This might not be the answer you're looking for, but since you have Photoshop, set up a batch job that saves them all into a new format (or saves as 24bit TIF) and you'll be good. Let me know if you need helping doing batch jobs.

Thanks.  I can do that (or, rather, my wife can).  I'm more interested in figuring out what's going on.

[patrickl]

TIFF files can contain a thumbnail image. The software that created the TIFF file probably created a faulty thumbnail image. Especially with higher bits per channel images this can go wrong.

I used TIFF files too a long time ago (scanned film processed through Neatimage for noise removal) and sometimes had similar issues. Although I used 48 bit TIFFs.

Like Rayb says, (batch) saving it from Photoshop should probably repair the thumbnail.

[shmokes]

email me one. I have Windows 7.

Done


edit:  Just kidding.  They bounced back, presumably cos they're too large (about 20 MB each or something -- I sent 2).

Duh . . . it was late last night.  I don't know why I didn't just throw the pictures into my drop box.  I'll do that when I get home later.

[shmokes]

TIFF files can contain a thumbnail image. The software that created the TIFF file probably created a faulty thumbnail image. Especially with higher bits per channel images this can go wrong.

I used TIFF files too a long time ago (scanned film processed through Neatimage for noise removal) and sometimes had similar issues. Although I used 48 bit TIFFs.

Like Rayb says, (batch) saving it from Photoshop should probably repair the thumbnail.

Would this explain why the pictures also won't open in Windows Picture Viewer, though?

[patrickl]

TIFF files can contain a thumbnail image. The software that created the TIFF file probably created a faulty thumbnail image. Especially with higher bits per channel images this can go wrong.

I used TIFF files too a long time ago (scanned film processed through Neatimage for noise removal) and sometimes had similar issues. Although I used 48 bit TIFFs.

Like Rayb says, (batch) saving it from Photoshop should probably repair the thumbnail.

Would this explain why the pictures also won't open in Windows Picture Viewer, though?

Not sure. I have had all kinds of compatibility problems with TIFF files though. Especially the ones with higher color depths. But then that was ages ago, you'd think that by now they'd got stuff to work properly.

The problem with TIFF is that it's a rather free format. Everybody adds their own specific parts too it and not everybody gets all the features implemented right.

If these things are 20MB, maybe it would be better to convert them to high quality jpegs anyway?

[RayB]

JPEG is lossy. Just a warning. (Like i said, I recommend PNG or TGA. They will still reduce filesize since TIF is a bloated format to begin with).

[shmokes]

Working tiff:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/387980/wed37.tif

Non-working tiff:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/387980/wed110.tif

[patrickl]

There is an alpha channel in the non-working one. You can remove this with Photoshop (uncheck the alpha channels box when saving).

BTW you should have cleaned the dust and fingerprints off the film before you scanned it.

[shmokes]

Thanks.  What does that mean, and why does it break the photo?

[patrickl]

JPEG is lossy. Just a warning. (Like i said, I recommend PNG or TGA. They will still reduce filesize since TIF is a bloated format to begin with).

Yeah JPEG is lossy, but you are really not going to be able to see the difference between a 2MB JPEG and a 20MB TIFF file. Especially not with these unenhanced slide scans. PNG can cut the filesize in half too though.

Also converting to JPEG or PNG also gets rid of the Alpha channel.

Maybe they forgot to get rid of the IR channel that some scanners create for dust removal. Although this Alpha channel seems to be completely black. My slide scanner would to show the dust specks on the IR layer and then the alpha channel culd be use to remove these specks of dust.

[patrickl]

Thanks.  What does that mean, and why does it break the photo?

Like I said in the previous post. I think it might have been intended as an IR dust removal channel  (dust specs show up on film in IR light while the film itself is "black")

Not sure why they left it in. Especially since it doesn;t seem to hold any IR info anyway. It's completely black and thus useless.

So in short, I have no idea why it's there or what it's supposed to do.

I'm guessing there is a bug in the thumbnail software of Windows. Like I said, TIFF is such a free format and not all software fully supports it and all it's features.

:edit: OK it's not a multipage TIFF. It's a 4 layer image. Which explains the odd 32 bit color depth that you mentiond. It's actually a 24 bit RGB image and a fully black 8 bit alpha channel.

Still, I guess it's just a bug where the Microstf TIFF library can't handle the extra layer. Now that I think about it I sometimes had to remove the IR layer too for some software to work with the TIF files.

[RayB]

Yeah JPEG is lossy, but you are really not going to be able to see the difference between a 2MB JPEG and a 20MB TIFF file. Especially not with these unenhanced slide scans. PNG can cut the filesize in half too though.

True, but you never know when you may want to retouch a photo, or cut n paste portions of it. When you do that from a JPEG, on saving again, you end up re-compressing an already compromised photo and eventually the image degrades enough to look crappy.

shmokey: Patrick already addressed the issue, but I had a fun refresher on the various formats' file sizes. I did color correction while I was at it: http://www.rayb.com/temp/wed.zip

Let me know when you've downloaded this so I can delete it.

[shmokes]

Got 'em.  They look a thousand times better.    Thanks.  And thanks to both of you for all the info.

[patrickl]

Yeah, if you are planning on using these photo's you probably still need to fix them up. These look like untreated film scans and film always had problems with color balance. A digital camera can correct itself based on whether it's in electric lights or if it's in sunlight, but a chemical film obviously couldn't.

If anything just a simple "autocolor" setting will usually clean them up a lot. If you're just having them printed, the printer will do that for you though. They always tend to run the pictures through some sort of enhancing software before it's printed.

[shmokes]

My wife said she has to use TIFFs because she can't save PNGs in CMYK which she needs when working with printers.

[RayB]

OLD printers. 

[patrickl]

My wife said she has to use TIFFs because she can't save PNGs in CMYK which she needs when working with printers.

That doesn't make much sense since the TIFFs are RGB encoded, but if she wants to use TIFFs then that's not a problem is it? Just costs a bit (lot) more diskspace. You could still use JPEG though. I know RayB says it's lossy, but most digital camera's make JPEG files from the pictures you take. Why would a fuzzy scan of a negative need better treatment than a pristine picture taken by a digital camera? In fact if you send the files to an online printing service they will probably convert them to Jpeg anyway.

I don't have the files anymore, but are they using a CMYK colorspace? You'd lose a lot of colordepth by using CMYK. If you think about converting them to CMYK I'd suggest you not do that (not knowing the reason why you want CMYK or if it's actually on the files already now though).

A proper printer should be able to make the best conversion of an RGB image to the colors that it (or they) can print. I can't imagine any printer asking for CMYK these days. Especially not for foto's.

[shmokes]

I doubt those photos are CMYK.  I imagine they're TIFF just because that's how they were scanned years ago.  But after reading this conversation I asked her why she still uses TIFF and that's what she said.  Printers want it.

[patrickl]

I doubt those photos are CMYK.  I imagine they're TIFF just because that's how they were scanned years ago.  But after reading this conversation I asked her why she still uses TIFF and that's what she said.  Printers want it.

Seriously? I haven't been asked to use CMYK images in at least a decade. Even for offset printing they convert the stuff themselves.

They know what the color profile of their printer is and they are better able to convert the RGB image to the best possible reproduction in CMYK.

Also, don't you lose a lot of color when you convert to CMYK? I can't imagine that using CMYK for your originals is a good option.

[RayB]

I second what Patrick is saying. Since the late 90's, printers have beeing converting to digital printing that can pretty accurately reproduce the RGB color space in print. Even Scott at MameMarquees prefers that we keep files RGB. Alas, in high-end print, and designing in Illustrator for print, I know CMYK is still fairly ingrained.

[shmokes]

Yeah . . . I mentioned Patrick's comment to my wife and she said things must be much different in Amsterdam cos she works with a lot of printers and they pretty much all require files in CMYK.  She does a lot of work in Illustrator, but quite a bit more in Quark and InDesign.  I know very little about the subject, but it sounds to me like what you guys are saying makes perfect sense but the industry has not caught up yet.

[patrickl]

Yeah . . . I mentioned Patrick's comment to my wife and she said things must be much different in Amsterdam cos she works with a lot of printers and they pretty much all require files in CMYK.  She does a lot of work in Illustrator, but quite a bit more in Quark and InDesign.  I know very little about the subject, but it sounds to me like what you guys are saying makes perfect sense but the industry has not caught up yet.

I can imagine offset printers asking for CMYK. It's just that we are duscissuing photo's here. They are usually printed on photoprinters and they work better when you give them RGB files. Everybody sends them JPEG files in RGB, so that's what they deal with and these days they can print much more colors than CMYK colorspace allows.

If you are using these photo's as images in a brochure (made in Illustrator or something similar) of which you have them print hundreds of copies, then it might very well be that they ask for CMYK. Though, in that case I would still not convert my photo's to CMYK, but I'd convert a copy to CMYK.

[lilshawn]

they may require images CYMK coded so that there is no (less) color shift when printing. when it comes to printers, what you see is definitely NOT what you get. the color info probably gets converted 10 times before it hits the page.

as mentioned before jpeg is a compressed format, and the compression is allot better than it used to be. so issues with image quality are not as bad as they used to be.

[shmokes]

Though, in that case I would still not convert my photo's to CMYK, but I'd convert a copy to CMYK.

This is what she does.