TIFs going bad (black & transparent)

[PatrickJ]

Hi Everyone,

I've been working in the past few days on incorporating PSU into my workflow, and have been doing so while editing the latest bunch of photos from my last trip. It's been a great experience until this morning when I made a disconcerting discovery - about 20% of all my edited TIFs have become either entirely black or transparent. No image data seems to be left. When rebuilding the thumbnail in PSU for any of the affected photos I see the following instead of a new thumbnail:

"Invalid TIF strip found (0)".

I cannot say for sure PSU caused this, but I've never seen it happen before so my gut feeling is to start troubleshoot there. My suspicion is that this happened when the folder was re-validated in PSU. I know for sure the TIFs were OK yesterday.

I use the following software, and in all honesty all are possible culprits:

• Capture One - RAW editing, and creating the TIFs

• Affinity Photo - do all TIF editing here

• PSU - Metadata

• Topaz Denoise - PP

Any ideas what might have caused this? Also if anyone has any ideas if the TIFs can be rescued that would much appreciated, spent quite a bit of time on editing these so having to start over would be quite the bummer.

Thanks!

/Patrick

Thumbnail in PSU after recreating it

thumbnail.JPG (17.26 KiB) Viewed 14040 times

How Windows File Explorer is showing the files (1st TIF OK, second TIF is transparent and third TIF black)

tifs.JPG (13.19 KiB) Viewed 14040 times

[G8DHE]

Yes I must admit I have seen this, I don't often use TIF these days, so I couldn't be certain which programs might have affected them, but either they go Black or on some much larger images the image blocks seemed to be transposed, the latter were correctable.

TIF_errors.jpg (21.1 KiB) Viewed 14015 times

[Mke]

I only have 704 TIFs in my collection (most of them scanned prints, all of them with PSU-generated metadata embedded in them) and I've never seen a problem. As a check I just rebuilt the thumbnails of a batch of them and they all still look good.

I've not used any of the other software you list.

[Sigi]

Hello Patrick,
I have also seen this and I am not quite sure what caused it. In my case I just went back to my raw file and exported again as tiff.
On the other hand I have only had that issue about a year ago and never since

Sigi

[wesstl]

This happens to to my tiffs constantly but I've never posted here because I assumed it was other software. My workflow:

DXO Photolab for Raw to tiff
Affinity Photo for editing of tiffs
Photo Supreme for file management

It's not a major problem for me because I usually save all my edited tiffs as layered afphoto files, leaving the tiffs unedited for later use. And I've never had a corrupted afphoto file. The only time I revisit the tiffs is if I try a different crop and I can always create a new tiff from the Raw. Still, it's disconcerting and I'd like to know what causes the corruption.

[sanphotgn]

"Invalid TIF strip found (0)".

Maybe related, maybe not, but a previous discussion referencing the above:

viewtopic.php?t=28409

[PatrickJ]

Thanks for the replies!

Luckily I was able to recover almost all lost TIFs (thanks to backup versioning - yay!), but not entirely sure where to go on from here to avoid this happening again. I have saved a few of the TIFs that went bad (both in their pre and post corrupt state) so thinking filing a bug for this would be the next step (if PSU has a bug tracker).

Not too keen on converting all TIFs to .afphoto, as my experience is it produces massive files. Need to look into it again though, perhaps this has changed.

[PatrickJ]

"Invalid TIF strip found (0)".

Maybe related, maybe not, but a previous discussion referencing the above:

viewtopic.php?t=28409

Interesting, I also used color tags to indicate different states, so indeed this could be the same issue!

[sanphotgn]

so thinking filing a bug for this would be the next step (if PSU has a bug tracker).

Here:

https://mantis.idimager.com/login_page.php

[PatrickJ]

"Invalid TIF strip found (0)".

Maybe related, maybe not, but a previous discussion referencing the above:

viewtopic.php?t=28409

Updated the above bug report, sent the "before and after" tifs to the support team and referenced this thread. Let's see what happens.

[MarqsM]

I have only few dozen TIFF files left from days of yore and I don't have the Affinity Photo so I cannot verify this, but my debugging sense suggests to also check the aforementioned software to eliminate all the possible culprits.

Since both of you are using Affinity Photo for some PP, and in both instances it is a step right before DAM work in PSu - could be that Affinity Photo is saving a non-standard TIFF after some of the tools were used? And then, when the PSu writes metadata to that TIFF, it may corrupt the file? TIFFs can be compressed with different algorithms, can be single image or multi-page, can have the metadata embedded etc. - in other words, TIFF file types are a-plenty.

I would do a simple test: generate some TIFF files in DxO PL/C1, do not apply any PP in Affinity Photo and then process the files in PSu, as usual (do what you always do - labelling etc.). Then check if the same problem appears.

[Sigi]

just to add my 2 cents. I am not using Affinity and also had issues with my tiffs. They came via DXO

[wesstl]

If it's not Photo Supreme then it's more likely to be DXO on my end as I do not save tiff files in Affinity. They get opened in Affinity but the resulting layered file is saved as afphoto leaving the tiff as it came from DXO. I'm going to take a look at the settings in DXO export.

[Sigi]

The weird thing is that it only happened to about 30 tiffs exported from DXO and that must have been DPL4. I have not had that issue with DPL 5.

[PatrickJ]

I have only few dozen TIFF files left from days of yore and I don't have the Affinity Photo so I cannot verify this, but my debugging sense suggests to also check the aforementioned software to eliminate all the possible culprits.

Since both of you are using Affinity Photo for some PP, and in both instances it is a step right before DAM work in PSu - could be that Affinity Photo is saving a non-standard TIFF after some of the tools were used? And then, when the PSu writes metadata to that TIFF, it may corrupt the file? TIFFs can be compressed with different algorithms, can be single image or multi-page, can have the metadata embedded etc. - in other words, TIFF file types are a-plenty.

I would do a simple test: generate some TIFF files in DxO PL/C1, do not apply any PP in Affinity Photo and then process the files in PSu, as usual (do what you always do - labelling etc.). Then check if the same problem appears.

Difficult to say for sure, but what I know is that the TIFs were working just fine immediately after using Affinity Photo. I usually rebuild the thumbnail in PSU after having sent the photo to Affinity, and never saw any issues. So some something happened at some point, corrupting 20% of my TIFs in one go. It could of course be so that AP or Topaz introduces something in the TIF file structure that PSU doesn't like, which later on then leads to corruption, but again hard to say.

Hert has helped me to troubleshoot this, but unfortunately I haven't had much time due to travelling. So far I have not been able to reproduce the issue. Will probably continue to work my photos with an increased backup process in place, and keep an eye on this to see if I can catch this happening again (and figure out what causes it).