RE: 8 verses 16 bit

["Paul D. DeRocco" <pderocco@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

16-bit is primarily important when capturing input, because it allows you to
capture a wider dynamic range, for later manual compression into the range
you ultimately want. For instance, if you're doing night photography (or
scanning a slide shot at night), you want to keep the exposure low enough
that the glow around lights doesn't completely saturate to white, but this
means that most of the detail will be way down in the shadows. If you have,
say, 12 bits of actual resolution in the A/D converters, then you'll be able
to use the Curves adjustment to boost the low end by four stops, compared to
what you could have achieved with only 8-bit input.

I think it would also be nice to maintain images in 16-bit mode so that you
can work on them over and over, tweaking curves, applying filters, and so
on, without worrying about accumulated round-off errors. However, this is an
unnecessary luxury if you're careful, and do things in the right order.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@ix.netcom.com

> From: John Henry Galindo
>
> Will someone please tell me the advantage(s) of working with 16 bit
> verses 8 bit files. Better yet, is there an online tutorial?

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