STIFF is a program that converts scientific FITS images to the TIFF format for illustration purposes. The main features of STIFF are:

* Accurate reproduction of the original surface brightnesses and colours * Automatic or manual contrast and brightness adjustments * Automatic sky background intensity and colour balance * Adjustable colour saturation * Colour-friendly gamma correction capabilities * One or three input channels: gray-scale or true colour output * Output with 8 or 16 bits per component * Pixel rebinning and x/y flip options * Support for arbitrarily large input and output images on standard hardware (BigTIFF support) * Support for tiled, multiresolution pyramids * Support for lossless and lossy compression methods * Multi-threaded code with load-balancing to take advantage of multiple cores and processors. * XML VOTable-compliant output of meta-data.