Classes to handle the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). See the TIFFCodec documentation for the amount of support that is built into this package.

## Package Specification

The most important class is TIFFCodec, extending the base class for image codecs, ImageCodec. TIFFCodec reads the TIFF header, then the image file directory of the image to be loaded (TIFF can store more than one image in a file). The information of an image file directory is put into an object of class TIFFImageFileDirectory. It contains the tags of that directory (each tag is of type TIFFTag), and the most important information of a directory can also be retrieved from the various get methods (e.g. getCompression). TIFF files can be stored using all kinds of compression methods. When reading TIFFs, each supported compression method gets its own class extending TIFFDecoder, which provides basic methods required by all decoders (like storing decompressed data). A TIFFCodec object that is supposed to read an image creates an appropriate TIFFDecoder (e.g. TIFFDecoderUncompressed for compression type `1`, no compression) for each strip or tile and lets them do the image loading.