TIFF photos appear black in Preview, Finder, and Photoshop

Change the format, say png for example.

Save as

or

export

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Bug Reporter https://bugreport.apple.com/

FWIW, this may be totally irrelevant to your post but here is the list of Apple Raw Support on Yosemite…

Digital camera RAW formats supported by OS X Yosemite - Apple Support

Also, I downloaded a few sample IIQ files and was able to open and work with them using Affinity Photos including exporting them to TIFFs without losing EXIF data. Once exported to TIFF, Preview opened them without a problem.

Hello dialabrain,

You seem to need a big TIFF file, but not too big. I had to go begging for one. Someone finally took pity on me and sent me a 40 MB image that demonstrates the problem. On the other hand, I have lots of satellite imagery in the 400 MB range, but that is well beyond Preview's capabilities.

Well, I just downloaded a 74.3 MB Tif from here…

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/snt?subselect=Mission:Mars+Sample+Retur n:

and it displays fine.

I think it may be a problem with what version of Tif is being used. I did find a couple very small tifs that wouldn't open in the Preview pane. Just guessing. I've viewed dozens since the post.

I suggest just avoiding Preview. It really isn't suitable for professional formats. I had difficulty reproducing this bug but only because I had difficulty finding a valid TIFF file that Preview would even attempt to open.

You can export to a different format. You just can't use any Apple code to do it. I did a small sanity check by using GDAL to export a TIFF that Preview couldn't open to a JPEG2000 file that Preview could open just fine. There just aren't many other formats that can handle 16-bit pixel depth and can be opened by Preview. Unfortunately, there aren't that many tools (other than ones you build yourself, like GDAL) that aren't going to use Apple's code.

I ran into a very similar problem recently with XML documents. Apple applied some security fix and broke XML DOM parsing. It was fixed a couple of builds later. Unfortunately, we are so close to the Sierra launch that I don't know if 10.11.X will ever see a fix for this bug.

FWIW, I eventually got tired of opening Tifs but I could open the majority of them large or small. I did find a few smaller ones in a collection of tifs that would not open but others would from the same collection. Personally I think the format of the Tif is the issue. I opened 20 or 30 16bit Tifs from tiny ones <100k to over 100MBs in Preview. As I said though I did find a few that would display as black or not at all.

An analogy I suppose would be PDFs where most will open correctly in Preview but some will not.

dialabrain wrote:

An analogy I suppose would be PDFs where most will open correctly in Preview but some will not.

That goes for pretty much any complex file format. The real issue is that these same files worked fine before and now they don't. The range of TIFF variants that Preview supports is now a little bit smaller. And what are the variants that Preview does and does not support? That isn't documented anywhere.

This phenomena is not limited to only the TIFF format but also the IIQ format raw files that are the basis for Phase One digital camera backs. Worse than a TIFF that just won't preview on your system, this bug is corrupting entire sessions (shoot project folders) in Capture One.

I've had two clients late last week have problems with this bug, one of them far worse than the other.

Client A:

Processing out 16-bit Tiffs and they all appear black to Preview. Sent them to me and they look fine on my 27" iMac running Yosemite. [Problem of viewing 16-bit TIFF isolated to his machine - Non Destructive]

Client B:

Migrating Capture One-7 sessions to Capture One-9 and all the thumbnails are black. I had him zip the converted session and when I opened it in Yosemite, the IIQ’s (raw files) were actually black as seen in either Capture One 9.2.1 or even in the finder, but for some reason Adobe Camera Raw could see the images. [Problem of viewing IIQ Raw files transfers also to my machine - **Potentially Irreversibly Destructive**]

In the case of Client B, he has no ability to make use of images that had been shot into a previous version of Capture One because the mild database conversion to the new version inspires a re-generation of thumbnails which overwrites them in black where there were unique previews before and ALSO alters the RAW file.

These altered RAW files appear to be wiped of image information as I cannot open the session on a Yosemite computer and regenerate the thumbnails or process files out to any format including PSD or JPG that results in anything but an absolutely black file.

This is potentially a horribly destructive bug to Phase One shooters using Capture One, because without redundant untouched backups of the work that they're trying to open, this bug could lead to losing access to their raw images forever, at least to the extent of the deep RAW information contained in the Phase One format file that Adobe Camera Raw doesn't read or have access to.

Brad Kaye

Technical Support Manager

Capture Integration

Screenshot of 16bit Tiff OS X 10.11.6

fwiiw, this is the list for El Capitan:

Digital camera RAW formats supported by OS X El Capitan - Apple Support

Hello Keith,

It is a bug in the OS. People report that it started in 10.11.6. I checked in Mavericks and it works fine there. Any app that uses Apple's built-in TIFF logic will also fail.

I'm having some trouble reproducing the problem.

I do not have many tif / tiff photos, but in my 10.11.6 Preview is showing them correct.

I can not reproduce your issue.