Convert PDF to TIFF

TIFF is not a format anyone chooses for convenience. It is chosen for it: by print shops whose workflow was built around it, by document-management and records systems in law, insurance and healthcare, by fax and archive gateways, and by scanning software that has written TIFF since the 1980s and sees no reason to stop.

What all of those have in common is that they want a picture of a page with nothing clever in it — no fonts to substitute, no compression scheme to disagree about, no embedded objects. TIFF gives them exactly that, and its stubborn size is the price of being readable by a machine nobody has updated in fifteen years.

A PDF page is a set of instructions: draw this glyph from this font at this position, stroke this line, place this image. A TIFF is the result of following those instructions once, at one particular resolution, and then forgetting them. The page looks the same and behaves completely differently.

Concretely: the text is no longer selectable, copyable or searchable, links stop being links, form fields stop being fields, and the file no longer scales — it looks right at the resolution you chose and soft above it. If any of that matters, keep the PDF as well. Converting to TIFF is something you do for a specific recipient, not something you do to your only copy.

The DPI setting decides how many pixels the page is rendered into, and it drives both the quality and the size. At 150 dpi an A4 page comes out around 1240 by 1754 pixels — comfortably sharp on any screen. At 300 dpi it is 2480 by 3508, which is the standard requirement for printing and for most archive specifications. At 600 dpi it is 4960 by 7016, and worth it only for fine line art or very small type.

If the system you are feeding has published a number, use that number. Where none is given, 300 is the safe default for anything that might be printed and 150 for anything that will not.

The TIFF written here is uncompressed baseline RGBA: every pixel stored as four plain bytes, red, green, blue and alpha, with no encoding scheme wrapped around them. That is a deliberate choice, because it is the one variant of TIFF that every reader in existence accepts. LZW and the various JPEG-in-TIFF flavours are smaller and are exactly where old software starts refusing files.

The arithmetic follows from that. An A4 page at 300 dpi is about 8.7 million pixels, so roughly 35 megabytes. At 150 dpi it is nearer 9 megabytes. This is normal for TIFF and not a sign that something went wrong — if the file needs to travel by email, ZIP it, because uncompressed pixel data compresses very well.

Each page becomes its own TIFF. Leave the Pages box empty and the whole document is rendered; name a range — 1-3, 7, 10- — to get less. Anything past a single page arrives as a ZIP with one numbered file per page, rather than as a single multi-page TIFF. Fifty pages is the ceiling for one run, because a page being drawn at 300 dpi is about 35 MB before it is compressed.

That matches how the systems asking for TIFF usually work — one image per page, named in sequence — and it avoids quietly producing a 350-megabyte file from a ten-page document. If you genuinely need a multi-page TIFF, it has to be assembled by a dedicated imaging tool afterwards.

The page is rendered in full colour with an alpha channel and stored that way. A scanned black-and-white document converted at 300 dpi is still a colour TIFF containing black and white pixels — visually identical, structurally different.

Some archive standards specify bitonal (one bit per pixel) or greyscale TIFF, usually with Group 4 fax compression. That is not a format conversion but an imaging decision — a threshold has to be picked, and picking it badly destroys thin strokes and light stamps. Software built for scanning does it properly; a converter guessing at it would not.

If nobody has specifically demanded TIFF, they are almost certainly the better answer. PNG holds exactly the same pixels as the uncompressed TIFF, losslessly, at a fraction of the size, and every program made this century opens it. JPG is smaller still and fine for a page that is mostly a photograph.

Reach for TIFF when a specification, a submission portal or a print operator names it. Otherwise the same page as PNG is the identical picture in a file people can actually email.

The PDF is rendered and the TIFF written by code running inside your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no server-side copy, no retention period to ask about and no queue to wait in. The free tier takes files up to 100 MB each, which is well clear of the input side even when a single page turns into 35 megabytes of TIFF.

Given what typically gets converted to TIFF — signed contracts, patient records, court filings, insurance claims — that is not a detail. The safest handling of a confidential document is the kind where it never travels.