Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

I have a high resolution TIFF image that is LZW-compressed; I want to draw upon it and save it compressed. Since the compression takes much more time than I would expect, I wonder if I could just overlay the drawing without touching the data of the page. I suppose the answer is negative since I could find no provision for such a feat in the specification; however, I decided to ask just to make sure it is not supported because it would be awesome if it were.

There is no way to draw, or otherwise modify a compressed image. Generally IM will uncompress the image, do all operations, the re-compress using the same settings as the original, unless told otherwise.

Yes compression, especially level 9 compression does take a good amount of time.