If 8-bit is not enough…

Although there are more and more people who are aware of different photography aspects, the term “bit depth” is unclear to a lot of them. One can assume that this is something related to image quality, but no one can really explain what it really means. A bit is a small unit of data. 1 byte is comprised of 8 bits. Most of the digital equipment operates on 8 bit images (printers or monitors). So, most of the images we come across are 8-bit images. Bit depth informs us how many unique colors are there in the image. It does not mean that the image necessarily uses all these colors and can specify the level of precision instead. When talking about grayscale images, the bit depth identifies the number of different shades available. When we deal with images of higher bit depth, there are more shades or colors included. Bit depth influences the image size. If the bit depth goes up, the image size gets increased as well, and thus, there is more color information stored for each pixel in the image. Most cameras produce 8-bit data. DSLR cameras can produce 12-bit or more data when shooting in RAW. There are scientific CCD cameras that can produce 16-bit or even higher data. A 16-bit image can handle 65,536 discrete levels of information instead of the 256 levels that an 8-bit image can. A 48-bit image is capable of billions of colors. But there are no limits to the number of colors – we can come across 32-bit or even 64-bit images! Image processing for high-bit images needs to ensure the data accuracy. ImageConverter Plus can handle high-bit images including HDRI, RAW, and TIFF. Each image conversion and /or resize operation, as well as any operation where color processing is involved, is aimed at the most accurate data precision.