8bit vs 16bit - Why most PROs get Bit Depth WRONG?

welcome im sick in the short video you will witness everything you ever wondered about bit

depth

and at the end i will clear up two of the biggest misconceptions. First of all, it is very important to clarify the terms because bit

depth

goes by many names, bit depth is also called color depth or pixel depth when referring to a pixel, they are all the same, the best way to Remember it is that they all have the same depth suffix in common, the concept of bit depth. It is used in digital audio, digital video and digital images, but we are going to talk about digital images and since images are all about color bit depth, it is also called color depth here, probably just to confuse us, so do not confuse color depth with color gamut which is something completely different as explained in this video with depth or color depth or pixel depth specifies the number of bits used by each color component of a single pixel to indicate the color of that pixel, so what does this mean?

Let's break it down into a digital image. It is made up of millions of pixels or megapixels and each pixel displays a single color and this color is created with three specific values ​​of the red, green and blue color components to see how RGB colors combine to produce colors. Watch this video linked above when We talk about an 8-bit color image in Photoshop. It's supposed to be called eight bits per channel or BPC. It's not eight bits per pixel like it's made to sound. The three RGB color components of an 8-bit per channel image. In Photoshop there are eight bits of red plus eight bits of green plus eight bits of blue, so a total of 24 bits per pixel, so an eight bits per channel image, also known as true color, is the same as a 24-bit per pixel image, similarly, 16-bit per channel or deep color, as it is called, is 48 bits per pixel now that we have established that what are bits, the RGB color values ​​that Photoshop shows us They are simplified decimal numbers for people like you and me, our computers do not understand these numbers, they only read binary digits made up entirely of 0 and 1, for example, with decimal figures only 3 digits are required to write the highest value of 255 , but using binary figures of only 0 and 1 a total of 8 binary digits are needed. and these binary digits in short are called bits because of course binary digits sound too geeky so the coolest geeks call them bits and if you go up just one decimal number from 255 to 256 the binary equivalent will be one and eight zeros , which is nine. binary digits or nine bits in total so it exceeds eight bits that is why an 8-bit pixel can only have a maximum decimal value of 255 and if you have ever wondered why in Photoshop's color properties in the RGB section the scale is from 0 to 255 because this is where the number comes from and since 0 is counted as the first value and 255 as the last, the total is 256 tonal values ​​per color channel and, although we will never need 2, in reality it is possible to calculate the tonal values ​​of a pixel. is 2 to the pixel's bit depth, so a one-bit pixel has two possible levels.

An 8-bit pixel has 2 to the power of 8, that is, 256 levels, and a 16-bit pixel has 2 to the power of 16, that is, 2. multiplied by itself 16 times, which gives 65,536 levels of Donal, the The main difference between an 8-bit and a 16-bit per pixel is the total number of Donal values, so the more bits each pixel can have, will result in much smoother color transitions for the image. so in Photoshop, let's start with the

most

basic 1-bit image mode, which is also known as bitmap; You can see that when you zoom out, the image appears gray, but when we zoom down to the pixel level, you won't find any gray pixels in each of these.

Square pixels are individual black and white pixels, so the basic one-bit image allows each pixel to have only two colors, black or white. Now, if I undo this and convert it to grayscale mode, which is an 8-bit image, you can see the transitions. better compared to 1 bit image because here we have 256 gradation levels from black to white and various shades of gray available for each pixel. When we convert our image to 8-bit RGB color mode, we have three color channels of red, green, and blue. since we have 256 RGB values ​​in each color channel multiplied by three RGB channels, we get about sixteen point seven million RGB values ​​for an 8-bit RGB image and if I convert it to a 16-bit RGB image, if you remember the math , it will be 2 to the power of 16, that is, 65536 values ​​per color channel and 65536 multiplied by the three channels can generate an incredible 281 trillion RGB values ​​for a 16-bit image, but do you see any difference between 8 and 16 bits? image on my screen I can't if you think you can't see the difference because of YouTube video compression.

You can try this on your own screens, but I'm sure you'll get the same results. There are two reasons for this first Photoshop. isn't exactly full 16 bits, take a look at the options in this info panel in Photoshop. The 16-bit scale here shows 0 to 32,000,768, which including the first value of 0 is a total of 32,000,769 RGB values ​​per channel, not 65,000,536. What a true 16-bit offers is al

most

half that , this is because what Photoshop calls 16 bits per channel is actually 15 bits per channel plus one extra bit, so in Photoshop space it's 2^15 plus 1, giving a total of 32.000 769 RGB values ​​as we saw in the color picker, so the 32,000 769 RGB values ​​per color channel multiplied by the 3 channels give us a total of 35 billion RGB values ​​for the so-called 16 with RGB image in Photoshop, which still its alot. more than sixteen point seven million RGB values, then why we still can't see any difference which leads us to the second and main reason if you have noticed that these RGB values ​​are not colors, thinking or calling each of these sixteen point seven million RGB? values ​​like colors is a little tricky, sure there are trillions of color coordinates, but many of them are too similar for us to tell the difference.

Let me give you an example in Photoshop if you see the pure red color it has using 5500 for an 8-bit version and when I changed to a 16-bit version in the info panel, the same value for 16-bit is 32,000 768 for n and 0 for green and 0 for blue, a much larger number is used to describe pure red in 16-bit color than 8-bit color now, if I reduce the value of red by just one number to 244 and fill this color one to side by side with the red above, can you see any difference between these two reds just to show you? the difference if I hover over each red you can see the value change of red in the info panel so the difference of 1 8 bit value becomes 32,000 768 - 30 2006 39 i.e. a difference of 129 values ​​in 16 bits.

Now imagine 129 different gradations between these two reds, if I take red 255 as the foreground and in a new 16 bit document I create a gradient, I should have a total of 129 shades between these two reds. You can see them? Research has shown that humans can distinguish between two million to a maximum of less than ten million colors in most special cases, that means we can't even see the 16.7 million color values ​​of an RGB 8 bits, let alone the trillions of color values ​​of a 16-bit RGB, also when the 35 trillion RGB values ​​are mapped to a color space restricted to gametes, a significant amount of which will end up being mapped exactly to the same color coordinate, for this reason Photoshop will often show you a color value between 0 and 255 per channel, regardless of what bit depth it is. editing in 8 or 16 bit this is purely to simplify things for the user behind the scenes it uses the entire range of values ​​so I'm sure you must be thinking if you can't even see the full range of colors of an 8 bit .

Image while working with 16-bit, although this may seem unnecessary, the main benefit of using 16-bit is when you are editing a photo, especially when working in a larger color space like Prophoto RGB, when you manipulate a photo, you are compressing and pushing all RGB. Values ​​around this can create gaps between values, resulting in banding, so the more color data you have, the smoother the color gradients will be. Finally, the biggest misconception is that higher bit depth means better quality images. So just now I've shown you why a 16.-bit is better for retouching, but the usefulness of 16-bit ends there, the extra bits only matter for extreme colors and tones.

Corrections can save the image in 8-bit after editing is complete. A final uncompressed 8-bit output is equally good. As a 16-bit file, it will be clearly evident when you see the histogram, which will remain intact even after conversion from the 16-bit file. You will never see banding just because it is an 8-bit image. 8-bit already has so many more colors than human eyes can perceive that the only reason 8-bit has a bad reputation is because, unlike 16-bit images, they can be saved as JPEGs, meaning they can be adding JPEG compression to 8-bit files to reduce file size and of course, if you compare a low quality 8-bit compressed JPEG file to a 16-bit image, it's not a fair comparison, so don't avoid the 8-bit files if you make all the edits in a row and do not touch them up.

Photoshop at all, there is no point in converting to 16 bit, a high quality 8 bit is perfect now for those of you who, so far, what here is an additional myth, can pixels be deep? If you remember the term pixel depth. is the same as color depth or bit depth, so considering that pixels can be as deep as color or as deep as bits, when we talk about bit drop in simpler words, we are talking about how deep are the numbers to make the pixel depth. It's easier to understand. The deeper pixels, while they may seem silly, are in fact technically correct.

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