Which bit depth should you be using 8 bit vs 16 bit? - Fotospeed | Paper for Fine Art & Photography

hello and welcome to the photo speed video with me tim jones today what we are going to look at is do we need to use a 16 bit image or an 8 bit image when we are printing now this is a I get asked a lot if I

should

be checking that button 16 bit or

should

I just leave it at 8 bit and not worry about it so I thought I'd make this video to try to explain the differences between the two and also see if there are any practical differences between the two when we're doing a print but before get started as always don't forget to subscribe and also wait till the end of the video because i have a coupon code that will give you 15 off photo speed docs at photospeed.com ok let's get started and let me try to explain what 8 bit is and 16 bit so I always say I'll try to explain because they're not.

However, sometimes they're not the easiest things to explain, so an 8-bit image is usually a jpeg file that was saved, say, outside of Photoshop or outside of Lightroom or in our cameras or whatever now when we are talking about the bit

depth

of an image we are talking about the color information so an 8 bit image has 256 colors in its usable colors so if we take a 16 bit image and look at the information of color there that number from 256 colors jumps to 65 530 different colors we can have so it's absolutely huge and huge now there are arguments for and against and it depends who you ask our human eye really can't see so many colors or distinguish between so many tones in an image, so it's there.

It makes sense to use whatever I think there is because it's not so much the color information that's used within 16-bit that's a nice by-product it's almost the gradients and smoothness of your image that a 16-bit file will give you, so

which

are usually those big spaces that you've had to work on a bit, they're bringing in the skies or bringing in blown highlights etc. but now i'm going to take you into photoshop and i'm going to show you in a very extreme example how and what 8 bit can do to your image and why we should probably click on that 16 bit option or convert to 16 bit inside photoshop ok so let's dive into Photoshop and I'll show you what happens when you convert back and forth between 8-bit and 16-bit and what it can actually do to get you right so we've got an image in front of us here so we've got all of these millions. of colors to deal with 16 million gradients and trillions of different types of colors and gradients and different versions of them, but what does it mean? and then we can take a look and have a string and see what difference 16 bit and 8 bit really makes so first of all what I want to do is set my image to eight bits per channel to start with OK and then sometimes , there are some issues with Photoshop rendering the image to 8 bit and 16 bit when I'm zoomed out so I'm just going to zoom in a little bit and I'm just going to follow a little bit here under the glasses just to show you this now what 8 bit and 16 bit is the big advantage of working in 16 bit is the gradients now let me demonstrate this now what I'm going to do is add two curve adjustments one to make the image really dark and one to bring it back so if any Once you've underexposed your image and you need to free jailbreak and whatnot then add a curve adjustment or add some adjustments in lightroom or capture one or whatever this is an extreme version of what we'll do ok so I'm just going to add a curves layer just clicking my curves adjustment down here right now I'm in photoshop because this is the easiest way to demonstrate to be honest I couldn't really demonstrate it very well in lightroom and capture a photoshop does alright so i'm just going to add a curve fit just by clicking my fit here and with my curve fit right on the top i'm just going to scale this down to about the output at about 10 points alright so everything is dark now we can't see anything ok so now i'm just going to add another curve fit i'm going to bring this up. back so i'm going to set my input to 10 so i'm just going to move this top slider to the left and i'm going to set my input to 10. now now you should be able to see there's these kind of horrible gray markings and horrible gradients there my 8 bit image is

fine

so now let me change it to 16 bit and then hopefully you'll see what 16 bit can give us especially on the nose up here I just noticed that's

fine

too I'm just going to do click on 16 bit data and now hopefully you'll see it's a little bit level for us there's a lot especially you'll probably see it let me zoom in on my nose here because I just realized that part if I go back to 8 bit you can See all this horror going around on your nose here, let me zoom in a little too, can you see all this? you can see all these horrible artifacts and pixels and things that they just can't cope with but if i put it on 16 bit it all smooths out and it's pretty nice that's the last thing we do before we click print and create that print version now it just goes to image mode and 16 bit, the beauty of working in something like Lightroom or Capture One is that this will happen automatically for you, you will always work in 16 bit as long as you check that box in the print module or in your print settings print to print 16 bit because generally if you're working from a raw file you'll always be in 16 bit within those programs so that's the beauty of it you don't even have to think about it. just keep that box checked now in photoshop you have to tell photoshop to print at 16 bit so it's in the print dialog and it just says send 16 bit data this is on a mac on a pc this it's actually in the print settings and it's within your dialog to send 16 bit data there and this will give you a much smoother gradient so what I'm going to do is print this image to a3 do a real world comparison with in fact take a look and see if 16 bit or 8 bit makes any difference when we're actually hitting that print button ok so let me just print them out and then we'll look at them ok so I've given these a print so I printed them thinking there will be a little bit of change between the two not a huge amount but just a little bit and I'll be able to say oh it's a little smoother however I've been tested. a little bit wrong there really is a dramatic difference um the tones in the 8 bit image here are really blocked and not very smooth they also don't blend very well when you compare it to the 16 bit image everything is much smoother it's not perfect because as i said before this test was a bit extreme we should say i really messed up those curves as you saw a bit so it was very extreme in what i did however again the difference is noticeable to be honest i hope you can see this in the close ups i did on the 8-bit image especially the cheek area this is where i see it it's really blocky and horrible on the 8-bit and then just lovely and smooth on a 16-bit, so the difference is huge, not a huge difference in color or variance to be honest, but both were printed

using

the Pro 1000's black and white mode here, so no i was putting in a profile or whatever here but it shows a lot in the gradients here too so there's a big difference between working in 16 and 8 bit now if you shoot raw on your cameras you'll usually shoot in around 12 at 14 bit most cameras don't go up to 16 bit so basically the other two bits aren't used so if you shoot and convert to 8 bit you're throwing away all that beautiful color information that's there it's always there It's worth saving your raw files as a 16-bit file like a TIFF or Photoshop file. raw so all that information is still there for you so if you're editing in Capture One or Lightroom you shouldn't worry about this just always check the box for 16 bit data I think Capture One prints to 16 bit. the moment you can't turn it off if your printer is capable of it will accept that data for you and send it to the printer now in lightroom there is a little checkbox if you're on a mac or it's in the driver if you're on a pc It's always worth searching and trying to find that 16 bit data option and send it in some cases, I know with canons you have to if you're on a PC and

using

Windows.

You may need to download a small plugin for your driver like an xps driver so it's worth a look and download it and it will only send you 16 bit data

which

is fantastic ok well hope that was helpful and i hope i have opened up the world of 8 and 16 bit data for you, as i said i hope i explained it well and i hope you will all print in 16 bit from now on. now i promised at the beginning of the video that if you watch till the end there will be a coupon code for photo speed docs and the coupon code is fs youtube and that will also get you 15 photo speed docs and also if you haven't already click the subscribe button it really helps us here photo speed and getting the word out about printing your images and the power of printing too ok until next time bye