The Secret to High Detailed Photography

understanding bit depth for photographers hi i'm joel grimes i am a commercial photographer been making a living with my camera for well i think almost 40 years now so we're going to talk about bit depth it's not as probably as exciting as other topics uh when it comes to photography but i got to cover this folks because so many people come and ask me and when i do a workshop i get into the bit depth part and people go i never knew that and it could make a big difference if you can understand a little bit about bit depth so one thing i'm not going to do is get into a lot of diagrams with math and all that you can find that on the internet and i when i do a big presentation on bit depth i have a powerpoint that has a lot of those kind of diagrams in it we're going to avoid that today because i want to get to something i think that is more important than all the numbers it's the concept or the mindset around understanding bit depth so let's get started so when it comes to bit depth it's not where you end up it's where you start that's most important so most of the show are images on the web on our devices and it's the jpeg jpeg which is very low compressed uh quality so why don't i start out in an 8-bit jpeg well because 8-bit jpg has very little information for you and if you go to manipulate it or do anything it's going to fall apart so you start out with the highest amount of bit depth or information in your image you can and then you work down toward eventually maybe viewing it on a device or on the internet or whatever but you don't start out in 8-bit so we talk about the capture side of photography now you can capture i think my cameras all do a jpeg and a raw at the same time or you can set it to just jpeg only again not recommended at least unless you're doing a news photography where it goes straight from your camera down to some kind of upload system where it goes to a new service or whatever and nobody touches it and it goes on whatever device to to show the news but when it comes to bringing your image into photoshop you want to go and set your camera to the highest setting which is in the raw format now um when i started out my first digital camera was 12-bit today it is 14-bit that's the standard camera that you have unless you have a super high-end medium format camera that will capture 16-bit it is the standard right now is 14-bit so we really have basically three bit dips that we kind of talk about well there's actually four but three bits when it bit dips when it comes to capture 8-bit 14-bit or 16-bit so as i said the higher the bit depth the more you're going to be able to manipulate your image so when it comes to images like say an ansel atoms type a black and white landscape where you want to get that sky really deep black or you want to get the tones to really have this smooth gradient feel in the landscape well you need to get as high a bit depth as you can because when you start crunching the sliders to get those tones the way you want them and make them that dramatic look it's going to fall apart if you don't have the right bit depth that you're working in so i mentioned that we generally can capture in 8-bit 14-bit or 16-bit on a rare occasion photoshop gives you an option to go and work in 32-bit so how in the world do i get 32-bit well there's only one way that is to capture at least three images and under normal and over and we process it as an hdr now you've probably heard that term hdr has gotten a bad rap over the years because people think hdr is all about making this kind of bit mapping toning weird kind of look to your images no true hdr is about getting your as much bit depth as you can so increasing your bit dap now you can go and say get three exposures and go and get a 16-bit um file and work with that or we can go and do a 32-bit file now when you work in 32-bit unfortunately today photoshop changed this it comes back and spits it out as a 16-bit but all the crunching happens in 32-bit so we'll show you a couple samples that in a minute so bit depth really is as simple as possible it's the number of tones and colors and hues and values in your image and that represents the whole spectrum of what you want to show so the more bit depth you have the more tones or colors that you have to represent that image now our eye is extremely limited to um how much we can see i think it's under 10 million colors but in in photography we can get a trillion colors and our screens don't show that but it's possible mathematically to show how we can get an absorbent amount of information in an image but we are limited to what we can see so to me it's not about what i can see again if you say you show a 8-bit 16-bit or 32-bit on a screen that's not where the bit depth really comes into uh play it's when you crunch it so if you have a fifth wheeled rv trailer that you want to go and across america and rv across america you don't pull it with a little volkswagen you have to have a certain truck and when you go and buy a truck to pull a fifth wheel there's all these different things you have to understand about torque and about the size of the engine and all these things because when you go and pull up a hill you need as much power and torque as possible to get that fifth wheel up over the mountains it's the same thing with an image if you're going to be some doing some heavy lifting on an image you want as much power as you can behind that a manipulation to get the tones where you want them and i'm again i'm going to show you some examples in a minute so think of it as this you if you never manipulate uh image very little maybe just a little slider here and there of tones and whatever light contrast or maybe a value 14 bit's going to be fine but if you do things like i do i need that extra bit depth to give me the tones where i want them so when we talk about bit depth you have to understand that bit that falls from the top the highlights down to the shadows so there's more bit depth in the highlights than they are in the shadows now this is sort of opposite to what it was the mindset that we had when we shot film in the old days and so i had to kind of rethink how i did pictures now today what if i'm going to take a picture and i'm getting my you know the exposure the way i want it generally what i do is i expose for the shadows i know some people are going to go no joel you can't do that right because i know that it's the shadows that lack the most dip bit depth so if i want to pull detail out of the shadows in a digital file it's extremely difficult difficult to do that the more bit depth you have the more ability you can do that we're going to show you a graph here in a minute i don't want to show too many numbers but so it it it's the um when you talk about bit depth it's the gradients and it's the shadows uh that are the most important now highlights are two we gotta pull detail the highlights and it'll do that bit depth the higher the bit depth you'll have more detail there too but it's really the shadows and in the gradients that you're going to see the greatest increase in um what your final image is going to look like so here's a couple images that i have here's a lake tahoe i shot this with a tilt shift lens so i made it into panorama i shot three exposures uh two stops under normal two stops over and there was a big storm coming in and what i did on this is i actually bracketed my um iso not my shutter speed because i want the water uh when it's moving to be all the same uh uh blurredness and same thing with the clouds too and so that's not really important right now i talk a lot about that in some other videos but look at the tones that i have here i have you want to appear black and you want to pure white in your image but i have all these tones and the rocks and the uh clouds and all that that's because i processed this at 32 bits and if i had done and i'll show you some examples of side by side in a minute of a 8-bit 14-bit uh 32-bit but here we have a couple more images look at the tones that i'm getting here folks this is because i understand the value of bit depth here's an agave and so look at the va whoops that went too fast the value and change and that's black skies is another thing that are very very very difficult to manipulate in digital you could do it in the old days in photography with a red filter or a orange filter would make your skies black that's how ansel adam did it but in digital it's a little more difficult and you start cranking the sliders to do that and you will get mush really quick go high high grain here's an interior in guanajuato mexico a 32-bit processed uh natural i mean the light that's in there existing light in there uh the ambient light and um but look at the detail you can see the detail in the back of the um the chairs uh in the foreground uh the highlights the lights are not blown out if i had shot this one exposure no way would i have gotten that here's a up in oregon in silver falls state park uh getting and you're in the shade of the trees looking into the highlight of the where the waterfall is there's no way i could have gotten this picture without 32 bit processing and again the colors are all there so here is a chart oh my gosh let's just take a look at this briefly because um i don't want to bore you with numbers but if we look at 8-bit 8-bit has 256 colors you've heard that many that term many times it's per channel of course and it's times 3 when you do actually do the math but looking side by side here you can see that at 14 bit we have 16 000 bits per color per channel i mean and then 16 bit is 65 000 roughly and then 32 is 16 plus million uh values of color per channel once again we will never see that it's a mathematical equation but you can see that the uh the on the math side how much more information you are getting in uh the 32-bit say versus uh say a 14-bit it's a big jump i i want to emphasize this this you don't want to shoot 32-bit and you can't shoot 3-2-bit on everything you can't even do an hdr and everything so it's a limited um it's a limited application but when it comes to the processing your 14-bit um image you have to understand that when you go and manipulate that in lightroom or in bridge or when you get to photoshop you are going to be crunching certain areas of that image that if you don't have that if you say start out 8-bit it's going to be a disaster so this is why i want to i want you to have a mindset of what i'm talking about forget all the math and all that just more of a mindset that try to keep uh an understanding of why it's important to stick with the highest amount of bit depth as possible and i'm going to show you more images here in a minute some side by side now this is a really really interesting chart this shows the bit depth that is in the shadows okay now um i said that when you i'm sure tried this in a photograph when you go and pull out a shadow detail you go it's just noise there's nothing there because an 8-bit only has four bits of information per channel that is like pretty much nothing 14-bit has 256 a 16-bit has a little over a thousand but look at 32-bit 67 million values of color per channel and when you do the math on that it's like a trillion or something this crazy amount of information so when i'm doing a landscape or i'm doing even a portrait i do 32-bit on portraits um if i have a leather jacket a deep leather jacket of a harley rider kind of a tough looking person and i go and i shoot which i've done many times 32-bit portrait that leather jacket looks like something you can touch it's so beautiful the transition of tones and everything i don't do a uh hdr in every portrait i do and it's pretty again an application that's rare but when i get a chance to do it it looks incredible but especially on landscape or when i shot the harley bikes that i did for 100 days on the road a few years ago i shot everything in hdr and i processed everything in 32 bit and they look absolutely stunning i've had adobe ran a 10 by 8 foot image of one of my harleys for their display in one of the trade shows the the quality is absolutely stunning um we've done enough now of the numbers um let's talk about the the proof is in the pudding all right so here we have um a 14-bit image so this is right out of camera the way i would take it and then i went and did uh 32-bit hdr and i shot uh three a 200 normal two over sometimes i'll do one under normal one over depends on the the situation and i want you to look at the difference between the two here okay um the the left is not bad and this is again this is uh on video sorry i'm on a screen and then on my video and so the the the quality is going to be pretty poor uh as we get it to you but um i want you to think about just at least if you can see the tones of the smoothness of the rock the highlights on the top of that center rock the detail and the shadow behind that little center rock there and the little the little areas in the um in the water there um it's just there's such a smoother transition in um in the 32-bit one now this goes back to and i just did a whole master class on the print side of things i love outputting my images to print and it's when it's on a print folks that is where your jaw will hit the floor you really do see it now you can only print a 16-bit but once again you start out in 32-bit manipulate the image drop it into 16-bit and then you go and make a print out stunning if you send your print your your let's say you're it's your your amazing tiff file to a lab i've talked to all the big ones they will take that beautiful tiff that's 16 bit and convert it to an 8-bit srgb that's how they work that's how the big labs work because they need speed and they zip it around and they don't want a big file so the only way you're going to get the results you that you should have in a print is hire a master printer or do it yourself so i have a big old printer over here uh it's 44 inches wide it's one of the canon 4000 printers per one for 1000 printers and the the results coming off there are absolutely stunning and so that's one another reason why i'm always trying to stick with the highest bit depth is because my output is not just on a screen it is in a print so here is a 16 bit so i did an example a long time it was 16 bit then i went back and i did it with a 32 bit to see the difference so it's not a perfect lineup because it was a year apart between the two but look at the detail in the shadows that came out of this 32-bit let's try another one here so this is an example where i just pulled off the side of the road out and i think it was near death valley and um so this is eight bit and what i did was i i set my settings and then i ran that like that same setting on all these images so it wasn't like i changed the the settings uh in bridge uh for the i wanted to get the sky dark so i i think i did the blue slider to the left i changed a little bit of the highlights i went to the highlights to the left the shadows open and all the way to the right and then the blue slider to the left that's all i did and that's 8-bit here's uh 16-bit and here's 32-bit now what i want you to do is we're going to show up blown up a hundred percent so here's eight bit 100 percent and it looks like you've photographed um a kind of like parchment paper or something in the sky there it's kind of falling apart 60 but surprisingly got really grainy because of that blue slider pushing it over to the left to make the sky black produce all sorts of noise so i mean it's extremely forcing that file to do something but when you i did it in um uh well it's supposed to say 32-bit over here that's my mistake but this is the 32-bit image with the sky 100 blown up very very smooth and here's the image processed um the way i would see it as an artist and so um it's in it sends 16-bit but i processed it in um 32-bit i started out in 32-bit so what do we learn again forget all the math forget this concept that you have to understand uh how many bits per channel and all that stuff and there's some great videos on the internet that can that can go into that if you're really interested it's a mindset that you have to have that if you want to do high-end landscapes or you're doing car uh uh shoots for clients or whatever it is architecture um if you're doing um images like even still life or like for even food or product where you have to have the the greatest amount of tones possible and the smooth amount of gradations then you have to increase the amount of bit that they're using and i've got videos on showing how to process uh these images in 32-bit on on youtube here so take a look for those i'm going to give you guys the files to this image right here the one of um the joshua tree so you can go and practice that and you can go and blow it up and look and zoom in that'll give you an idea you say joel i don't really know i've never shot an hdr well this will allow you to do that look for that file of or that say that video of me showing you how to process in 32-bit um there's a lot to be said here don't have all day so i got to keep this short i love talking about this but think of at least going into um photoshop and let me show you this let me do this i'm going to show you one thing before we go here is um let's just go command r is going to bring an image up i want to show you one little trick that literally uh when i teach a workshop um not not half the class but there's a few people in the class that usually go oh my god joel i never knew this so when you load photoshop for the first time or when you update photoshop it's always going to go and default back in lightroom and in bridge to let's go down here at the very bottom i have it set to 16-bit but it defaults to right here 8-bit srgb srgb so when i update my photoshop sometimes i'm like i know for a day or two i don't even notice i'm like oh for crying out loud um i got to go back in here and go to 16-bit and i either profoto or adobe rgb as my default so that when i process it it keeps it as a 16-bit file it's really a 15-bit 0.1 bit file but they call it 16-bit um your 14-bit camera capture file doesn't convert to 15 or 16-bit but you work in a 16-bit environment that's what they call it so if you don't have that set you're going to be taking those beautiful files that you shoot in raw with that super expensive camera and you're throwing all that information out the window and i talk a lot about that i talk about like buckets of marbles and i go through this big huge illustration it's kind of crazy but just make sure you have that set to 16-bit and at least adobe the rgb 1998 setting or pro photo and that'll give you the best results for your images so happy shooting get out there and create image don't forget you can download that um those files and if you want say hey joe i like this image subscribe to my channel and hit that notification bell and we'll keep on giving you some great content [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Joel Grimes Photography

Views: 169,043

Keywords: high detail, more detail, photography, tutorial, photoshop, bitdepth, bit depth, whats bitdepth, whats bit depth, how to print big photos, advertizing photography, advertising photography, improve photos, dramatic portrait, dramatic photography

Id: 4yE0m-I4tY4

Length: 23min 40sec (1420 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 26 2021