From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Color
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8-bit and 16-bit images - Photoshop Tutorial
From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Color
8-bit and 16-bit images
- [Instructor] In this movie I'll explain the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit images. Most images we work with are 8-bit. That is there are eight bits of information to describe every pixel. Two to the power of eight, hence the 256 brightness levels in an RGB image. For most images, this is enough. 16-bit images contain twice as much data. The most common type of 16-bit image is a camera raw file, and both the Camera Raw plugin and Adobe Lightroom let you edit and output 16-bit images. Here I have the same image as an 8-bit and 16-bit version. On screen they're not going to look any different. If we look at the document sizes, we see that the 16-bit is literally twice the size of the 8-bit version. What we gain with the 16-bit version is the ability to tease out more information from the image. Because there's more data to work with, we can make more changes to the levels or curves before a histogram starts showing the telltale signs of degradation, a combed effect, indicating…
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