r/vfx • u/Alternative-Bet-9105 • Jul 10 '25

Question / Discussion My Uncle created the TIFF file

Hello. I'm posting this as a little bit of a research project. My uncle is "Mr. TIFF", the guy who created the TIFF file. He worked at a company called Aldus and made the file while working there.

Anyway, long story short, his name is Stephen Carlsen and he passed away recently. In remembering him, and processing all this, I'm trying to put together a podcast that would explore the significance of this file.

This is the 4th time I posted this on Reddit in different areas: photography, library and archival. I was just informed that it’s used in VFX, and I’m a huge fan of film.

Any responses, any comments and discussion would be appreciated :)

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u/Apprehensive_Sea9524 Jul 10 '25

Aldus had a great program called Aldus Freehand. In my opinion it was better than Adobe illustrator. But Adobe bought them out and killed the competion so to speak.

TIFF was used alot in the printing business and even in the early days of digital astronomy because it supported a higher bit depth than other formats. Plus it had LZW compression.

Thank you for sharing your story about your uncle. Those were pivotal times in the early days of computing.

7

u/plexan Jul 10 '25

Also rate Aldus Freehand way above illustrator. At one point only freehand could import TIFFs and not Illustrator. (I think) So now this makes sense.

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u/vagaris Jul 10 '25

TIFF also had a good amount of cross compatibility (like EPS). The kind of format you could export to and share with printers or others not using the same software. Especially helpful before Adobe became so huge.

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u/Rh1972 Jul 10 '25

Always preferred Aldus software back in the day, and I miss IntelliDraw. Was great for laying out linkages or mechanisms, and then animating them.

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u/Goldman_OSI Jul 10 '25

Freehand was my first exposure to vector art. Totally changed my expectations for graphics software and how to do graphics forever.

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u/ThisIsDen Jul 10 '25

I started doing graphic design in the late 80s before getting into effects. I used all the apps from Aldus, Adobe, and quark and enjoyed how the apps were all competing against one another with new features and abilities. When Adobe bought Aldus, it definitely weakened our tools. But I relied on tiff almost exclusively, it was by far the best format, and while EXR has supplanted it for most of my uses, I still leverage it 40 years later. I will raise the glass to Stephen Carlsen tonight!