A pretty decent way to wrap the libtiff command-line tools from python. Pretty decent, that is, until you remember that `sh` exists and works even better... http://amoffat.github.io/sh/

tiffwrapper.py

import subprocess

def create_libtiff_tool(command_name):
    try:
        help_str = subprocess.check_output(
            command_name,
            stderr=subprocess.STDOUT
        )
    except subprocess.CalledProcessError, e:
        help_str = e.output
    def libtiff_tool_wrapper(*args):
        return subprocess.check_call([command_name] + list(args))
    libtiff_tool_wrapper.__doc__ = help_str
    return libtiff_tool_wrapper

libtiff_tools = [
    'tiff2bw',
    'tiff2pdf',
    'tiff2rgba',
    'tiffcp',
    'tiffdiff',
    'tiffdump',
    'tiffinfo',
    'tiffset',
    'tiffutil',
    'tiff2icns',
    'tiff2ps',
    'tiffcmp',
    'tiffcrop',
    'tiffdither',
    'tifficc',
    'tiffmedian',
    'tiffsplit'
]

G = globals()

for command in libtiff_tools:
    G[command] = create_libtiff_tool(command)

__all__ = libtiff_tools