edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format. It will be better than TIFF
PNG offers only a tiny subset of what's possible with TIFF. Note that TIFF supports multiple compression formats, lossless and lossy, multiple sample formats and sample counts, very flexible organisation of data layout etc. PNG offers a small number of sample formats, fixed layout and compression, and none of the higher-level TIFF features.
PNG is simple and easy to use. But "better" is subjective and by most objective measures it's inferior to TIFF.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Negative DNG is based on the TIFF/EP standard format, and mandates significant use of metadata
You don't have to call it a new format, TIFF has supported lossless compression for decades now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF#TIFF_Compression_Tag
DNG is also based on TIFF, so I can imagine people might use libtiff to read DNG headers.
This is very helpful for processing which treats each pixel as a sample of the scene, such as computational microscopy or remote sensing. I've always wondered if that had something to do with why it was hosted at remotesensing.org.
Viewers of libtiff often treat it like PNG/JPEG, but good Tiff viewers can leverage this functionality. Typically few batteries are included.
Tiff is kind of a cross breed between structured portable formats (HDF5/NetCDF) and imagery.
1. On-disk size
2. Compression/decompression speed
3. Access speed (for use in image analysis algorithms, editing, compositing, etc)
4. GPU friendliness (which operates in warps on small blocks of contiguous pixels in image space)
TIFF doesn't really optimize for any of these (not even #2 since in-memory decompression can be faster than paging uncompressed data from disk)
It's being slowly replaced by HDF5 for some applications.
But all of the features you mention above are tunable and are in practice perfectly fine with TIFF containers.
Yes, but for most image formats they aren't defined. They are for TIFF.
The problem, of course, is that if you use an exotic TIFF feature, very few TIFF readers will understand you.
.PSD is tightly tied to Photoshop's internals, and .xcf is tightly tied to Gimp's internals. (The Gimp core developers explicitly recommend against using .xcf as an interchange format, even though the format has a fairly complete publicly available spec.) I've seen .gif images with multiple frames used as images with layers, but that forces every layer to have the same resolution, and of course limits you to an 8-bit color depth.
Supposedly the Gimp and Krita devs are collaborating on a new interchange format that will support things like layers, but I haven't heard any news about that in years.
Unfortunately, it looks like there's no support for it in Photoshop, and I doubt that's likely to change.
Not all images are taken by cameras using 3 channels.
The PNG-format supports them (up to 4 channels) however not all apps know what do with them.
It's a shame since the compression technology was impressive and j2k would also have made a great progressive image format had browsers supported it.
I work for a company that makes workers' compensation software. I don't know of anything in our product that actually generates new TIFFs, but we've got plenty of old ones bumping around that were either uploaded by users or imported from other systems. I end up interacting with TIFFs one way or another every other month or so.
Nor clipping paths.
For print, there is not really an "open" alternative that is as good as TIFF.
Texture data for some videogames
Portable format for layered composites (a la Photoshop)