Free online PDF to TIFF converter

A document-management system, scanner workflow, or print service may accept TIFF but reject PDF, requiring each page to become a raster image. TIFF is also useful when fixed page appearance matters more than selectable text or compact storage.

What the PDF format is

PDF is a page-description format that preserves text, fonts, vector graphics, images, layout, and metadata across operating systems and printers. Adobe Acrobat, web browsers, office suites such as LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, desktop-publishing software, scanners, and virtual printers create PDF files. A PDF may contain searchable text and vector elements, although scanned PDFs may contain only page images.

What the TIFF format is

TIFF is a raster image format used for scanning, publishing, medical imaging, fax workflows, and document archiving. It supports grayscale and color images, high bit depths, lossless LZW and ZIP compression, and multiple pages in one file. TIFF is suitable when the receiving application requires pixels or when consistent rendering matters, but it is usually larger than a PDF and does not normally preserve selectable text, forms, annotations, bookmarks, layers, accessibility tags, or digital signatures.

How to convert the file

For a quick conversion without installing software, use the converter on 101convert.com: upload the PDF, choose TIFF, start the conversion, and download the result. Do not upload confidential documents unless the service's handling and retention terms meet your requirements.

For local and repeatable conversions, Poppler's pdftocairo renders each PDF page directly to TIFF:

pdftocairo -tiff -r 300 input.pdf page

This creates files such as page-1.tif and page-2.tif. The -r 300 option sets 300 DPI. Convert only pages 1 through 5 with:

pdftocairo -tiff -r 300 -f 1 -l 5 input.pdf page

Render one page as one file with:

pdftocairo -tiff -r 300 -f 3 -l 3 -singlefile input.pdf page-3

Install Poppler through the package manager for your operating system. Most renderers create one TIFF per page. To combine numbered pages into a multipage TIFF, use libtiff's tiffcp:

tiffcp page-*.tif output.tif

Use zero-padded names such as page-001.tif for large batches, because shell wildcard ordering can place page 10 before page 2. Confirm that the receiving program supports multipage TIFF; some applications require one file per page.

ImageMagick can also perform the conversion when its PDF delegate, commonly Ghostscript, is installed:

magick -density 300 input.pdf -compress LZW output.tif

ImageMagick may block PDF reading through its security policy, and its handling of page ranges and multipage output varies by version. Poppler is generally more predictable for PDF page rendering.

Quality and compatibility settings

Use 300 DPI for ordinary text documents and 400–600 DPI for small print, fine line art, or demanding OCR. Higher DPI increases image dimensions, processing time, and storage use; it cannot restore detail missing from the source PDF.

Use LZW or ZIP for lossless output. Avoid JPEG compression for text and line art because it introduces block artifacts; JPEG compression can reduce the size of photographic pages but is lossy. Use grayscale instead of 24-bit color when the document contains no meaningful color. An 8-bit grayscale TIFF is substantially smaller than a same-size color TIFF.

Converting a PDF rasterizes its text and vector artwork, so the TIFF cannot retain the original PDF's normal text selection or vector scalability. Forms, annotations, bookmarks, embedded files, layers, accessibility information, and signatures are not carried over as editable PDF objects. A digital signature on the source PDF is not valid for the newly rendered TIFF.

Transparent PDF content may be rendered against a solid background, depending on the renderer and output settings. If the PDF contains an embedded TIFF and the goal is to recover that original image rather than render the page, extract the embedded image with a PDF inspection or graphics tool instead of converting the entire page.