8bit vs 16bit - Why most PROs get Bit Depth WRONG?

[Music] welcome I'm sick in the short video you'll witness everything you ever wondered about bit-depth and in the end I'll clear two of the biggest misconceptions first of all it is very important to clarify the terms because bit-depth goes by many names bit depth is also termed as color depth or as pixel depth when referring to a pixel they are all one and the same thing the best way to remember that is that they all have the same depth suffix in common the concept of bit depth is used in digital audio digital video and digital images but we are going to talk about digital images and since images deal with color bit depth here is also called color depth probably just to confuse us so don't mistake color depth for color gamut which is a completely different thing as explained in this video with depth or color depth or pixel depth specifies the number of bits used by each color component of a single pixel to indicate the color of that pixel so what does this mean let's break it down a digital image is made up of millions of pixels or mega pixels and each pixel displays only a single color and this color is created with three specific values of the red green and blue color components to see how RGB colors combine to produce colors watch this video linked above when we talk about an 8-bit color image in Photoshop it is supposed to be referred as eight bits per channel or BPC it is not eight bits per pixel like it's made to be sound the three RGB color components of an 8-bit per channel image in Photoshop is eight bits of red plus eight bits of green plus eight bits of blue so a total of 24 bits per pixel so an eight bits per channel image also known as true color is the same as 24-bit per pixel image similarly 16-bit per channel or deep color as it is termed is 48 bits per pixel now that we have established that what in the world are bits the RGB color values shown to us by Photoshop are simplified decimal numbers for people like you and me our computers don't understand these numbers they only read binary digits made up entirely of 0 & 1 for example with decimal figures it only requires 3 digits to write the highest value of 255 but using binary figures of just 0 and 1 it takes a total of 8 binary digits and these binary digits in short are called bits because of course binary digit sounds too geeky right so the cooler geeks call it bits and if you go just one decimal number higher from 255 to 256 the binary equivalent will be one and eight zeros which is nine binary digits or nine bits total so it exceeds eight bits that's why an 8-bit pixel can only have a maximum decimal value of 255 and if you have ever wondered why in Photoshop color properties in the RGB section the scale is from 0 to 255 well this is where the number comes from and since you count 0 as the first value and 255 as the last the total is 256 tonal values per color Channel and although we will never need 2 it is actually possible to calculate the tonal values of a pixel it is 2 to the power of whatever bit depth of the pixel so one bit pixel has two possible levels 8-bit pixel has 2 to the power of 8 that is 256 levels and 16-bit pixel has 2 to the power of 16 that is 2 multiplied by itself 16 times which is 65,536 Donal levels the main difference between an 8-bit and a 16-bit per pixel is the total number of Donal values so more the bits each pixel can have translates to a much smoother color transitions for the image so in Photoshop let's start with the most basic 1 bit image mode which is also known as bitmap you can see when zoomed out the image appears gray but when we zoom in all the way to pixel level you will not find any gray pixels each of these square pixels are individual white and black pixels so basic one bit image allows each pixel to have only two colors black or white now if I undo this and convert it to the grayscale mode which is an 8-bit image you can see it transitions so much better compared to the 1 bit image because here we have 256 levels of gradation from black to white and various shades of gray available for each pixel when we convert our image to the 8-bit RGB color mode we have three color channels red green and blue since we have 256 RGB values in each color channel multiplied by three RGB channels we get about sixteen point seven million RGB values for an 8-bit RGB image and if I convert it to 16-bit RGB image if you remember the math it will be 2 to the power of 16 that is 65536 values per color Channel and 65536 multiplied by the three channels can lead to an incredible 281 trillion RGB values for a 16-bit image but do you see any difference in the 8-bit and 16-bit image on my screen I can't if you think you can't see the difference because YouTube's video compression you can try this on your own screens but I'm sure you'll get the same results there are two reasons for this first Photoshop doesn't exactly have full 16 bits take a look at this info panel options in Photoshop the 16 bit scale here shows 0 to 32,000 768 which including the first value of 0 is a total of 32,000 769 RGB values per channel it is not 65,000 536 what a true 16-bit offers it is almost half of that this is because what Photoshop calls 16 bits per channel is actually 15 bits per channel plus one extra bit so in photoshop space it is 2 ^ 15 plus 1 which is a total of 32 thousand 769 RGB values as we saw in the color picker so the 32,000 769 RGB values per color channel multiplied by the 3 channel gives us a total of 35 trillion RGB values for the so-called 16 with RGB image in Photoshop which is still a lot more than sixteen point seven million RGB values right so why can't we still see any difference that brings us to the second and the main reason if you have noticed these RGB values are not colors thinking or calling each of these sixteen point seven million RGB values as colors is a bit misleading sure there are trillions of color coordinates but many of them are too similar for us to notice the difference let me give you an example in Photoshop if you see the pure red color which has the use of to 5500 for an 8-bit version and when I switched to a 16-bit version in the info panel the same value for 16-bit is 32,000 768 for n and 0 for green and 0 for blue a much larger number is used to describe the pure red in 16-bit color than the 8-bit color now if I reduce the red value by just one number to 244 and fill this color side-by-side with the previous red can you see any difference between these two reds just to show you the difference if I hover over each red you can see the red value change in the info panel so the 1 value difference of 8-bit becomes 32,000 768 - 30 2006 39 that is 129 value difference in 16-bit now imagine 129 different gradations between these two Reds if I take the 255 red as the foreground and in a new 16-bit document create a gradient it should have a total of 129 total shades between these two Reds can you see them you see research has shown that humans can distinguish between two million to a maximum of less than ten million colors in most special cases that means we can't even see all the 16.7 million color values of an 8-bit RGB let alone the trillion color values of 16-bit RGB also when the 35 trillion RGB values are mapped to a gamete restricted color space a significant amount of that will end up getting mapped to the exact same color coordinate for this reason Photoshop will often show you a color value between 0 to 255 per channel regardless of what bit depth you edit in 8 or 16 bits this is purely to simplify things for the user behind the scenes it utilizes the full value range so I'm sure you must be thinking if you can't even see the full range of colors of an 8-bit image while working 16 bits although this may seem unnecessary the main benefit of using 16 bits is when you're editing a photo especially when working in a larger color space like prophoto RGB when you manipulate a photo you're compressing and pushing all the RGB values around this can create gaps between values resulting in banding so the more colour data you have the smoother your color gradients are going to be so finally the biggest misconception higher bit depth means better quality images so just now I've showed you why a 16-bit file is best for retouching but the usefulness of 16-bit ends right there the extra bits only matter for extreme color and tone Corrections you can save the image in 8 bits after editing is complete an uncompressed 8-bit final output is equally good as a 16-bit file it will be clearly evident when you see the histogram which will stay intact even after the conversion of the 16-bit file you will never see banding just because it's an 8 bit image 8 bits already has far more colors than the human eyes can perceive the only reason 8-bit has a bad reputation is because unlike 16-bit image it can be saved as a JPEG this means JPEG compression can be added to 8-bit files to make the file size smaller and of course if you compare a low-quality compressed 8 bit JPEG file to a 16-bit image it is not a fair comparison so don't shy away from 8-bit files in if you do all your editing in row and don't retouch in Photoshop at all there is no point in converting to the 16-bit a high-quality 8-bit is just perfect now for those of you who what so far here is a bonus myth can pixels be deep well if you remember the term pixel depth is the same as color depth or bit depth so considering that pixels can be as deep as color or as deep as bits can be so when we talk about bit dip in simpler words we are talking about how deep the numbers are so to make pixel depth simpler to understand deeper pixels although may sound silly they are in fact technically correct okay now is the time for you to LIKE share and subscribe to this wonderful new channel and put that well to be notified as soon as a new video releases if you have any questions or suggestions please leave them in the comments below as always thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: StyleMyPic

Views: 56,906

Keywords: bit depth, what is bit depth, bit depth explained, 16 bit, 8 bit, understanding bit depth, color bit depth, color depth, 24 bit, image bit depth, video bit depth, learn bit depth, 8-bit, camera bit depth, que es el bit depth, bit depth tutorial, cual bit depth usar, 8bit 16bit 32bit color depth, bit depth in-depth, 8 vs 16 bit, Deeper Pixels, pixel depth, #PWX, #SMP

Id: Y-wSHpNJs-8

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019