Working with TIFFs (import, export) in Python using numpy

Question

I need a python method to open and import TIFF images into numpy arrays so I can analyze and modify the pixel data and then save them as TIFFs again. (They are basically light intensity maps in greyscale, representing the respective values per pixel)

I couldn't find any documentation on PIL methods concerning TIFF. I tried to figure it out, but only got "bad mode" or "file type not supported" errors.

What do I need to use here?

Answer 1

First, I downloaded a test TIFF image from this page called a_image.tif. Then I opened with PIL like this:

>>> from PIL import Image
>>> im = Image.open('a_image.tif')
>>> im.show()

This showed the rainbow image. To convert to a numpy array, it's as simple as:

>>> import numpy
>>> imarray = numpy.array(im)

We can see that the size of the image and the shape of the array match up:

>>> imarray.shape
(44, 330)
>>> im.size
(330, 44)

And the array contains uint8 values:

>>> imarray
array([[  0,   1,   2, ..., 244, 245, 246],
       [  0,   1,   2, ..., 244, 245, 246],
       [  0,   1,   2, ..., 244, 245, 246],
       ..., 
       [  0,   1,   2, ..., 244, 245, 246],
       [  0,   1,   2, ..., 244, 245, 246],
       [  0,   1,   2, ..., 244, 245, 246]], dtype=uint8)

Once you're done modifying the array, you can turn it back into a PIL image like this:

>>> Image.fromarray(imarray)
<Image.Image image mode=L size=330x44 at 0x2786518>