Rohman
Nobody picks TIFF for fun in 2026. If you're converting a PDF to TIFF, someone asked you to: a litigation support team, a document management system, a fax server, a print shop or an archive. They all said "TIFF", and they almost certainly meant different things by it.
TIFF is a container, not a single format. The same .tif extension can hold a 12 KB black-and-white page or a 104 MB color one. The four settings that decide which one you hand over are bit depth, compression, resolution, and whether pages go into one file or many. Get those wrong and the file opens fine on your machine and gets rejected on theirs.
Quick answer: To convert PDF to TIFF, render each page at 300 DPI with lossless compression (LZW or ZIP), as one multi-page file unless the recipient asks for one file per page. PDF to TIFF does this in your browser. Before you convert, check the recipient's spec for bit depth: if it says "Group IV" or "black and white", they want 1-bit pages, which takes one extra step (below).
Who Still Asks for TIFF, and What They Mean
| Who asks | What they usually want |
|---|---|
| Litigation (discovery productions) | Single-page, 1-bit, Group IV TIFF at 300 DPI, each file named by its Bates number, plus load files and OCR text |
| Fax servers and fax-to-email | TIFF Class F: 1-bit, CCITT Group 3 or 4, 204 x 196 DPI ("fine") or 204 x 98 ("standard") |
| Archives and digitization projects | Uncompressed or losslessly compressed color/grayscale TIFF at the highest resolution you have |
| Print shops and some document management systems | 300 DPI color or grayscale, LZW, often multi-page |
Discovery. This is where most legal TIFF demand comes from, not court filing (federal e-filing systems want PDF). ESI protocols spell out the format in detail. The stipulation entered in MDL 2327 is typical: "Single page group IV compression TIFF images shall be provided using at least 300 DPI print setting. Each image shall have a unique file name, which is the Bates number of the image." Those productions normally go through a review platform that also builds the load files. If you're preparing a small set yourself, number the pages first with Bates numbering so the stamp is part of the image.
Fax. Fax machines never got past black and white. A fax server's TIFF is TIFF Class F: 1-bit pages, CCITT compression, and the odd 204 x 196 DPI resolution that comes from fax hardware. Most modern fax services take PDF directly, so check before you convert anything.
Archives. The Library of Congress lists TIFF first among its preferred formats for still images, uncompressed preferred, at the "highest resolution available, not rescaled or interpolated." Archives want the most information you can give them, which is the opposite of what fax wants.
Bit Depth: The Setting Most People Get Wrong
Here's the same born-digital A4 text page, saved as TIFF four ways. I measured all of these with our encoder, apart from the Group 4 rows, which I made with ImageMagick for comparison:
| Format | Size |
|---|---|
| 24-bit color, uncompressed, 300 DPI | 26.1 MB |
| 24-bit color, LZW, 300 DPI | 227 KB |
| 8-bit grayscale, ZIP, 300 DPI | 81 KB |
| 1-bit, CCITT Group 4, 300 DPI | 12 KB |
| 1-bit, CCITT Group 4, 200 DPI | 8 KB |
That is why discovery and fax specs insist on 1-bit Group 4. Across 50,000 pages, the gap between 12 KB and 227 KB is the gap between 600 MB and 11 GB.
Our converter writes 8-bit grayscale or 24-bit color. It doesn't write 1-bit Group 4 pages yet, and I'd rather say so here than have you find out from a rejected production. If the spec says Group IV:
- Convert with PDF to TIFF at 300 DPI, Grayscale on, "One TIFF per page".
- Turn each page into 1-bit Group 4 with ImageMagick:
magick page-1.tif -monochrome -compress Group4 page-1-g4.tif. For a folder of them,magick mogrify -monochrome -compress Group4 *.tifrewrites them in place.
Grayscale is the right choice for everything else that's mostly text: a third to 45% smaller than color in my tests, and nobody needs a color TIFF of black text.
DPI: Pick It From the Spec, Not From "Higher Is Better"
DPI decides pixel dimensions. An A4 page at 150 DPI is 1241 x 1754 pixels. At 300 it's 2481 x 3508. At 600 it's 4961 x 7016. Uncompressed size goes up with the square: double the DPI and the file is four times bigger.
Measured on two pages, a born-digital text report and a clean scan:
| Page | DPI | Uncompressed (color) | LZW (color) | ZIP (color) | ZIP (grayscale) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text | 150 | 6.5 MB | 105 KB | 75 KB | 48 KB |
| Text | 300 | 26.1 MB | 227 KB | 139 KB | 81 KB |
| Text | 600 | 104.5 MB | 504 KB | 348 KB | 190 KB |
| Scan | 150 | 6.5 MB | 169 KB | 143 KB | 95 KB |
| Scan | 300 | 26.1 MB | 566 KB | 451 KB | 308 KB |
| Scan | 600 | 104.4 MB | 1.9 MB | 1.5 MB | 1.05 MB |
My rule of thumb:
- 300 DPI unless someone says otherwise. It's what discovery protocols, OCR engines and print shops expect, and it's the default in PDF to TIFF.
- 600 DPI for archival masters, fine print, or pages with small type you may need to zoom into later. It's the "Archival" option.
- 150 DPI for screen viewing and previews, where nobody will print it.
One caveat for scans: if the PDF is already a scan, its resolution was fixed when the page was scanned. Converting a 200 DPI scan at 600 DPI makes a bigger file holding the same blur. The PDF to JPG guide walks through why.
Compression: LZW, ZIP or None
All three options in our converter are lossless. The page you get back is pixel-identical whichever one you choose; only the file size changes.
- LZW is the default because it's the most widely supported compressed TIFF. Older viewers, scanners' software and document management systems read it.
- ZIP (Deflate) was smaller than LZW on every page I tested, by 15 to 40%. Modern software reads it fine. Pick it when you know the receiving system is current.
- None is for picky systems and archives that insist on uncompressed. Expect files 50 to 200 times larger.
Both LZW and ZIP use the TIFF horizontal predictor, which stores the difference between neighboring pixels. On a document page, with long runs of white, that turns most of each row into zeros, which compress very well.
Avoid JPEG-compressed TIFF for documents, which some tools offer. It's lossy, it puts artifacts around text, and many TIFF readers handle it badly.
One Multi-Page TIFF or One File per Page
One multi-page TIFF keeps a document together: page 1 to page 40 in one .tif, which most document management systems and print shops prefer. It's the default.
One TIFF per page gives you page-1.tif, page-2.tif and so on, in a ZIP. Discovery productions and many imaging systems want this, because each page gets its own name (the Bates number) and its own line in the load file.
While writing this I found that our multi-page output had a ceiling. The library we used to write TIFF headers kept them in a fixed 20 KB buffer, which ran out at about 80 pages, so a 100-page contract couldn't become one TIFF. The converter now writes the TIFF structure itself and a test builds a 300-page file. I checked the output with libtiff's tiffinfo and ImageMagick, which read every page with the right size, compression and resolution tags.
Convert PDF to TIFF, Step by Step
- Open PDF to TIFF and drop in your PDF. Several at once works too. A password-protected file asks for its password.
- Choose DPI: 300 unless the spec says otherwise.
- Choose compression: LZW for compatibility, ZIP for smaller files.
- Turn Grayscale on for text documents.
- Pick one multi-page TIFF or one TIFF per page, and set a page range if you only need some pages.
- Convert, name the file, download.
Everything happens in your browser. That's worth something here: the documents people convert to TIFF are contracts, medical records, discovery sets and signed forms, and uploading them to a free converter puts a copy on a server nobody in your chain of custody has vetted. Here's why every OxygenPDF tool runs locally.
Going the other way, TIFF to PDF turns scans and fax pages back into a PDF, and OCR PDF makes that PDF searchable.
Frequently Asked Questions
What DPI should I use to convert PDF to TIFF?
300 DPI for almost everything: discovery productions, OCR, printing and document management. 600 DPI for archival copies or very small print. 150 DPI only for on-screen viewing. Fax is the exception, at 204 x 196 DPI, and fax services usually accept PDF anyway.
How do I convert a PDF to a multi-page TIFF?
In PDF to TIFF, leave Output on "Single multi-page TIFF" (the default) and convert. Every page of the PDF, or the range you set, becomes one page inside a single .tif file.
Is TIFF lossless?
TIFF can be, and with LZW, ZIP or no compression it is: every pixel is stored exactly. TIFF can also hold lossy JPEG compression, and 1-bit TIFF throws away gray tones on purpose. Converting a PDF page to any image is still a render, so text is no longer selectable until you run OCR on it.
Why is my TIFF file so large?
Usually no compression, color instead of grayscale, or a higher DPI than needed. One uncompressed color A4 page at 300 DPI is 26 MB. The same page with LZW is about 230 KB, and in grayscale with ZIP about 80 KB.
What is a Group IV TIFF?
A black-and-white (1-bit) TIFF compressed with the CCITT Group 4 scheme, originally designed for fax. It's tiny for text pages, about 12 KB for a full A4 page at 300 DPI in my test, which is why legal discovery protocols ask for it. It can't hold gray or color.
Can I convert PDF to TIFF without uploading the file?
Yes. PDF to TIFF renders and encodes every page in your browser, so the PDF never leaves your computer.
Read the Spec First
"Send it as a TIFF" leaves out most of the information you need. Ask four questions: what bit depth, what compression, what resolution, one file or one per page. With the answers in hand the conversion takes a minute.
Convert your PDF to TIFF, privately, in your browser.
