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I want to load and display a .tif image in OpenCV Python. I load the image using cv2.imread('1_00001.tif') and then I display it using plt.imshow(img), but the image displayed is all black instead of what it was originally.

I can load and display the image correctly using PIL's Image.open() and matplotlib's mpimg.imread() so I think it is a cv2 specific problem. However, I have also successfully displayed .jpg and .tiff images using the same cv2.imread() function so it may also be a problem with specifically that .tif image.

import cv2 import matplotlib.pyplot as plt img = cv2.imread('1_00001.tif') plt.imshow(img)

I expect an image of a circle with a few blurry lines inside, but the actual output is just a black image.

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  • It may be helpful to restate the question at the end of your post. Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 20:19
  • Try printing img.shape and img.dtype and img.max(). Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 20:20
  • Your current code seems to work with opening various .tif images, its most likely a problem with that specific .tif image Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 20:44
  • Can you share the problematic image? Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 22:55

3 Answers 3

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cv2 is a computer vision library designed to work with 8-bit rgb images. I suspect your .tif is monochrome, possibly uint16 (common for microscopes) You will therefore need the cv2.IMREAD_UNCHANGED flag if you wish to read the image with full fidelity.

import cv2 import numpy as np img = cv2.imread('1_00001.tif', cv2.IMREAD_UNCHANGED) print(f'dtype: {img.dtype}, shape: {img.shape}, min: {np.min(img)}, max: {np.max(img)}')

dtype: uint16, shape: (128, 128), min: 275, max: 5425

Without the cv2.IMREAD_UNCHANGED flag cv2 will instead convert the image to 8-bit rgb:

dtype: uint8, shape: (128, 128, 3), min: 1, max: 21

matplotlib.imshow has different behavior depending on input. An array of size [M,N] will be rendered with a colormap scaled to the data. An array of size [M,N,3] will be rendered as RGB in range 0-255 for int or 0-1 for floats (no autoscaling!) Most likely your image contained low integer values, and therefore appeared black when plotted in maplotlib without autoscaling. This should not be a problem if you use the cv2.IMREAD_UNCHANGED flag or plot one channel at a time.

You may also wish to look into other libraries designed spesifically for working with tiff files i.e. tifffile. However, I will note that cv2 is in my experience much faster than tifffile.

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Check your image pixel values. plt.imshow clips pixel values from 0-255, so I would guess that you're feeding in a PNG image with values greater than 255, and they're all getting clipped to 255 (black). Usually you'll want to normalize a TIFF or PNG image before feeding them to plt.imshow, so it's interesting that you're not seeing this problem on some tiff images.

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Im think, Some tiff tags not work properly with openCV try

img=cv2.imread("YOURPATH/opencv/samples/data/lena.jpg",cv2.IMREAD_COLOR) cv2.imwrite("1_00001.tif",img) img1=cv2.imread("1_00001.tif")
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