From the course: Digital Media Foundations

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High dynamic range: The biggest thing since color

High dynamic range: The biggest thing since color

From the course: Digital Media Foundations

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High dynamic range: The biggest thing since color

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- [Instructor] When we describe the brightness of a pixel using bits, perhaps using eight bits to give us a scale from zero to 255, we're not actually defining how bright 255 is. It would perhaps make more sense to describe this as a percentage, where not percent bright is completely dark and 100% bright is as bright as the pixel can go. But this would only give us 100 steps from dark to light, which we'd see in the image as banding or posterizing, where there are subtle gradients like shadows on a wall. Having 255 steps gives us a more subtle transition from dark to light, which is a good thing. As mentioned in the lesson on bit depth, the more bits you use to record a number the bigger the range of numbers you can make. However, no matter how big the number you use to record the brightness of a pixel, it will still only represent 100%. In the case of a camera recording an image, 100% is the maximum brightness the light sensor can capture without losing individual details. In the…

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