Ghostscript PDF -> TIFF conversion is awful for me, people rave about it, I alone look sullen

Question

My stomach churns when I see this kind of output.

http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/e1097a5a10.jpg

and this was my command as suggested by Best way to convert pdf files to tiff files

gswin32c.exe -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -sOutputFile=a.tif a.pdf -c quit

What am I doing wrong?

(commercial products will not be considered)

Answer 1

tiffg4 is a black&white output device. You should use tiff24nc or tiff12nc as the output device colour PDFs - see ghostscript output devices. These will be uncompressed but you could put the resulting TIFFs through imagemagick or similar to resave as compressed TIFF.