Problem
tesseract mytiff.tiff myout
Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine
name_to_image_type:Error:Unrecognized image type:mytiff.tiff
IMAGE::read_header:Error:Can't read this image type:mytiff.tiff
tesseract:Error:Read of file failed:mytiff.tiff
Signal_exit 31 ABORT. LocCode: 3 AbortCode: 3

Cause
For some reason tesseract is weird about the tiff extension. It needs to be "filename.tif"

Resolution
mv mytiff.tiff mytiff.tif
Then you can run tesseract and it will work
tesseract mytiff.tif myout
Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine