8 BIT COLOR CONVERTER PRO
8 BIT COLOR CONVERTER SOFTWARE

And even when I am looking for it, I cannot easily tell exactly where the edges are in comparison to a 10-bit gradient. I would almost certainly miss it if I weren’t looking for it. A 9-bit gradient is extremely faint (barely detectable) on both displays.

8 BIT COLOR CONVERTER PRO

With a clean gradient (ie, worst case conditions), I can personally detect banding in a 9-bit gradient (which is 2,048 shades of gray) on both my 2018 MacBook Pro Retina display and my 10-bit Eizo monitor. A better option would be “30-48 bits” (aka “Deep Color”), which is 10-16 bits/channel -with anything over 10 bits/channel being overkill for display in my opinion.įor the rest of this article, I’ll be referencing bits/channel (the camera/Photoshop terminology). In other words, “24-bits” (aka “True Color”) for a monitor isn’t super impressive, it actually means the same thing as 8-bits for Photoshop. Monitor vendors want to make their equipment sound sexy, so they typically refer to displays with 8-bits/channel as “24-bit” (because you have 3 channels with 8-bits each, which can be used to create roughly 16MM colors).

But most importantly, there are huge benefits to using a file format with a few extra bits (as we’ll discuss later).įor displays, the terminology changes. And opening a 12-bit file as 16-bits is really no different than opening an 8-bit JPG and then converting to 16-bits. So why doesn’t Photoshop open a 12 or 14-bit RAW file as 12 or 14 bits? For one, it would be a lot of work to develop both Photoshop and file formats to support other bit depths. Most cameras will let you save files in 8-bits (JPG) or 12 to 16-bits (RAW). Should you worry about this “loss” of 1 bit? No, not at all (15-bits is plenty, as we’ll discuss below). Why does Adobe do this? According to Adobe developer Chris Cox, this allows Photoshop to work much more quickly and provides an exact midpoint for the range, which is helpful for blend modes). Don’t believe me? Look at the 16-bit scale for the Info panel in Photoshop, which shows a scale of 0-32,768 (which means 32,769 values since we are including 0). So from a quality perspective, it would be very fair to say that Adobe’s 16-bit mode is actually only 15-bits. This means that instead of 2 16 possible values (which would be 65,536 possible values) there are only 2 15+1 possible values (which is 32,768 +1 = 32,769 possible values). However, it treats the 16th digit differently – it is simply added to the value created from the first 15-digits. Photoshop does actually use 16-bits per channel. You would assume that this then means 16-bits means 16-bits per channel in Photoshop. A 16-bit RGB or LAB image in Photoshop would have 48-bits per pixel, etc. Which means that an 8-bit RGB image in Photoshop will have a total of 24-bits per pixel (8 for red, 8 for green, and 8 for blue).

8 BIT COLOR CONVERTER SOFTWARE

Photography software (such as Photoshop and Lightroom) refer to the number of bits per channel. Each of these colors is handled by your computer and monitor as a “channel”. A color image is typically composed of red, green, and blue pixels to create color. Note that the image above is a black and white image. It would be convenient if all “bit-depths” could be compared directly, but there are some variations in terminology that are helpful to understand. In Photoshop, this is represented as integers 0-255 (internally, this is binary 00000000-11111111 to the computer). So “8-bit” = 2 8 = 256 possible integer values.

In general, the number of possible choices is 2 raised to the number of bits. When you combine 2 bits, then you can have four possible values (00, 01, 10, and 11). A single bit has 2 possible values, 0 or 1. Every time we add another bit, the number of potential combinations doubles. To describe something complex, we can combine multiple bits. If it was a pixel, it would be pure black or pure white. A single bit isn’t really good for anything beyond “yes” or “no” because it can only have 2 values. A “bit” is a computer’s way of storing information as a 1 or 0. What does it all mean, and what really matters?īefore we compare the various options, lets first discuss what the naming means. And our cameras often offer 12 vs 14-bit files (though you might get 16-bit with a medium format camera). Sometimes we see files referred to as being 24 of 48-bit. Photoshop offers 8, 16, and 32-bit file formats. “Bit depth” is one of those terms we’ve all run into, but very few photographers truly understand.

8 bit color converter