PDF to TIFF Converter

Convert PDF to TIFF Online

Rasterise every page of a PDF into TIFF images — the format document-management systems, fax gateways, prepress workflows and digitisation programmes still standardise on. Each page comes back as its own .tiff file with a "Download All (Zip)" button, rendered at the DPI you choose. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public.

Be clear-eyed about what the conversion costs you: a TIFF page is a flat grid of pixels, so the selectable text, live links and vector sharpness in your PDF all become picture.

How to Convert PDF to TIFF

1. Upload Your PDF File: Drag the PDF onto the page or click "+ Add Files". Add several PDFs to run them through with the same settings in one batch.
2. Set the Conversion Quality (DPI): This is the render density, not a vague quality slider — the list runs 72 to 1200 and opens on 300 DPI, the usual print and archival baseline. Pick 200 DPI for fax-style workflows and lighter files, or 400–600 DPI when small type has to survive OCR.
3. Choose a Compression Type: The dropdown opens on JPEG, which is lossy. Switch it to LZW for a lossless file that every TIFF reader understands, or DEFLATE for a lossless file that is usually slightly smaller.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and download the TIFF files. No sign-up, no watermark.

What Changes When a PDF Becomes a TIFF

Ten compression schemes appear in that dropdown and two of them will silently leave you with an unusable file. The sibling page, PDF to TIF, carries the full scheme-by-scheme comparison — the conversion behind it is identical, only the output extension differs.

Picking the Render DPI

Because a PDF page has a physical size, DPI translates directly into pixel dimensions: page inches multiplied by dots per inch. Those pixels then decide the file size far more than the compression setting does. The figures below are for a US Letter page at 8 bits per channel in colour, before compression — LZW or Deflate typically pull a text page well under these numbers, while a photographic page stays closer to them.

The practical guidance: 300 DPI unless you have a specific reason to move. Go up when an OCR engine has to read six-point footnotes; go down when the TIFF will only ever be looked at on a screen. Above 600 DPI you are almost always paying in gigabytes for detail the source page never contained — a PDF made from a 200 DPI scan does not gain sharpness from a 1200 DPI render.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will my multi-page PDF become one multi-page TIFF?

No — you get one TIFF per page, delivered as separate files with a "Download All (Zip)" button. The TIFF container itself can hold multiple images as separate subfiles, which is exactly why fax and archival systems adopted it, but this converter writes one image per page. If a single multi-page container is a hard requirement, keep the PDF, or rebuild one with TIFF to PDF.

Why would I convert a PDF to TIFF at all instead of keeping the PDF?

Because a lot of software will not take a PDF. Fax gateways, older document-management systems, eDiscovery load-file workflows, medical imaging platforms and some prepress pipelines expect a page-image format, and TIFF is the one they were built around. It is also an accepted preservation format: the US National Archives lists TIFF 6.0 among the file formats permitted for digitised permanent paper records (NARA).

What opens a TIFF once I have downloaded it?

On Windows, Photos and Paint open TIFF directly; on macOS, Preview does. Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, IrfanView, XnView and essentially every professional imaging tool handle it. The gap is the browser: Chrome and Firefox will not render a TIFF in a tab, so a TIFF is a poor choice for anything you intend to embed on a web page — PDF to PNG is the better target there.

Is the text still searchable after conversion?

No. Rasterising paints vector glyphs and embedded fonts into a fixed pixel grid, so there is no text layer left to select, copy or search — this is true of any image format, not a quirk of this tool. Keep the original PDF as the searchable copy. If the TIFF has to become searchable later, it will need OCR, which is a good reason to convert at 300 DPI or higher and to pick a lossless compression scheme now.

Does the output preserve colour, or is it converted to black and white?

Colour is preserved, at 8 bits per channel. There is no bit-depth control on this conversion path, so you cannot ask for a 1-bit bilevel or 16-bit high-precision TIFF here. If a downstream system needs bilevel Group 4 output, hand it a lossless colour TIFF and let it perform its own thresholding — fax servers and eDiscovery platforms have binarisation tuned for the documents they ingest.

What happens to transparent areas and coloured page backgrounds?

Transparent regions are filled before the page is written, using the colour under Image Transparency → Color, which is preselected to White. A background the PDF itself paints is simply rendered as drawn. There is no "keep the alpha channel" option for TIFF output on this path, so plan on an opaque page.

Should I use .tiff or .tif as the extension?

They are the same format. .tif dates from when Windows required three-character extensions and .tiff from Macintosh, which did not; every TIFF-capable application today accepts both. This page writes .tiff. The File extension selector offers TIFF and TIF and does not preselect either, so switch it if a receiving system is fussy about the spelling.

Is there a page or file-size limit on a large PDF?

There is no page cap and no sign-up, and nothing is watermarked. The real constraint on a very large document is upload size and connection speed, plus the fact that the output grows quickly — a 100-page colour report at 300 DPI is a lot of full-page bitmaps. Trim the DPI or convert in sections if the download becomes unwieldy.

Why is one TIFF page bigger than the whole PDF it came from?

A PDF stores a paragraph as font references and a handful of positioning instructions. A TIFF stores the finished picture of that paragraph, pixel by pixel — over eight million of them for a US Letter page at 300 DPI. Lossless compression squeezes the flat white areas hard but cannot recreate the compactness of vector text, so a multi-megabyte page from a small PDF is entirely normal. Lower the DPI first if size is the problem.