Export TIFF and BMP for print and archival

Before you convert anything, be honest about the destination. TIFF and BMP are not web formats. If the file is going into a browser, an email, a marketplace listing, or a website, both are the wrong answer: they are large, and BMP in particular opens poorly across modern tools. That is web-format territory, where WebP, AVIF, PNG, and JPG belong, and the image-formats guide covers that decision in full.

Reach for TIFF when something downstream expects a preservation-grade or print-grade master. Print shops, raster image processors, and scanning or archival pipelines widely accept TIFF as a high-fidelity exchange and storage format, which is exactly why it earns its large file size. Reach for BMP only when a named tool, an embedded display, or an older Windows workflow specifically requires it. BMP offers no modern advantage; it is a compatibility choice, not a quality choice.

The image matrix in Novus Convert runs to hundreds of active input-to-output pairs, and not every source targets every output. Before you build a job around a TIFF or BMP master, open /conversions and confirm your specific source-to-TIFF (or TIF) and source-to-BMP pair is listed. The conversion directory is the always-current source of truth for which routes are live, so checking it first saves you from assuming a pair that does not exist.

It is the file signature, not the filename extension, that decides which outputs appear for each row. Novus Convert reads what the file actually is, so a mislabeled source is caught at this stage rather than producing a broken result later. If a file named as a PNG is really a renamed JPG, the outputs offered will reflect the true type, and the TIFF or BMP route you expected may or may not be there for that real format.

Print and scan work is high resolution by nature, and that is where the limits bite. Active image routes accept a source up to 100 MB and up to 80 megapixels per decoded image. Those ceilings apply to the file you load in, not the file you produce, so it is the resolution of your scan or artwork that matters at this step.

To gauge it: an A4 page scanned at 600 DPI is roughly 35 megapixels, comfortably under the ceiling, while a large-format poster at a high DPI can climb toward the 80-megapixel cap. If a source is too big in pixels or too heavy on disk, it will not process, and the honest fix is to downsample or split it before converting rather than expecting the tool to accept it anyway.

Expect the TIFF you produce to be large, because that is the point of the format. A TIFF master preserves fidelity at the cost of size, so plan storage for the output even though the 100 MB and 80 megapixel figures govern the input.

Open the homepage or /convert, add the image, and set that row output to TIFF (or TIF). A mixed queue can send different files to different outputs, but for a print or archival run you are usually producing a single high-fidelity master per source, so set each row deliberately rather than flattening the batch into one output.

Remember that everything runs in browser memory and every result lives behind a temporary object URL for the current session. An archival export is not archived until you actually save the downloaded file into your own storage. Removing the job or closing the tab revokes the URL and the result is gone, so for preservation work especially, download the TIFF and file it into your archive right away.

Set the row output to BMP only to satisfy a specific requirement, such as an older Windows application, an embedded display, or a hardware toolchain that accepts nothing else. BMP is uncompressed and carries no modern feature, so there is no reason to choose it unless something downstream forces the choice.

Transparency is the trap to watch. BMP cannot store an alpha channel, so when you export a transparent source to BMP, Novus Convert flattens the transparent area onto a white background rather than silently dropping the channel. That is fine when the destination is a white page and wrong when it is anything else. If the subject has soft or anti-aliased edges, check how they read against white before you rely on the file, and keep a PNG or WebP master alongside so you still hold a version that preserves transparency.

Downloads unlock only after the output matches its expected signature and container. A TIFF or BMP that fails that check is not offered for download, which is safer than handing you a file that merely has the right extension. A conversion can still fail after processing when the result does not validate, and when a row fails the original source stays untouched, so you can retry or remove it without losing the other finished rows in a batch.

The remaining daily allowance shows beside the download control and is tracked per input format, resetting by local calendar day, so a run of print masters is not unlimited even though the app is free. Save each downloaded TIFF or BMP into your print or archive storage before you close the tab, because the session URLs are temporary and will not survive it.