TIF, or TIFF files are created in a high-quality graphics format used for storing images with many colours, such as digital photos. TIF includes support for layers and multiple pages. TIF files can be saved in an uncompressed or lossless format or may incorporate JPEG lossy compression. They may also use LZW lossless compression, which reduces the TIFF file size, but does not reduce the quality of the image.

TIFF was created in order to get computer scanner vendors of the mid-1980s to agree on a common scanned image file format, in favor of many proprietary formats. In the beginning, TIFF was only a binary image format (only two possible values for each pixel), because that was all that desktop scanners could handle. As technology advanced, scanners became more powerful, and desktop computer disk space became more plentiful, TIFF grew to accommodate gray-scale images, then colour images. Today, TIFF is a popular format for high colour-depth images, along with JPG and PNG.