How to open a corrupt Photoshop tif file

[marcdrc]

I have three Photoshop tif files, all approx. 25 mb that I am trying to open in Photoshop 7 (Mac Version) on OS X. The files were scans that were saved in Photoshop 5 as tif files. Now when I try to open them an error message appears stating that the files could not be opened because they are not Tiff files.

I have tried to open them in every available Photoshop format as well as thru other apps like Illustrator, Acrobat, Graphic Converter, IPhoto, etc... with no luck. I have renamed the file and made sure the extension is .tif but still no luck.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how I might be able to open these scans as I no longer have the original art? I was thinking that I might be able to redo the extension through some type of utility like terminal but am unsure how to do so. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Marc

 

[blueark]

Try opening the file in a text editor, and see if the first two charactors are MM or II. If it's neither, then it's not a Tiff file. If they appear, but not at the start, then possibly some other application has encoded it in some way. It's possible that the resource fork got mixed up with the data fork, but it's just a guess. Alternatively, it may have been compressed (some compression programs don't change the filename, so it may be misinterpretted). Try adding a .bin extension, for example, and double-clicking it.

 

[marcdrc]

Blueark,

Thank you for the info. I tried 2 text editors and neither had MM or II at the start. I also couldn't find the letters elsewhere in the file. Both had bizarre characters that I can't recreate in this post. My assumption is the files are corrupt.

However, on a new note regarding the files. I had originally copied these off of a CD to my HD and tried to open them and that's when the trouble started. I decided to go back to the CD and doubled clicked the files and one of the files opened fine and I was able to do a resave to my HD and now it works fine. The other two also open but the images are different from what the files are. For example, the file is labeled Horse and I know it's a Horse but it opens a file of a Cow, which is also on the CD. So, Obviously, there is some type of corruption of the two files or the CD.

I don't know if there is any way to get back the original Horse file. Thanks for the info though, I greatly appreciate it.

Marc

 

[mscallisto]

There also could be table of contents (toc) problems with the CD, have you tried to create a new CD from the old?

just a thought

 

[marcdrc]

mscallisto,
I haven't tried that yet but I will.

Thank you,
Marc