- the difference between 14-bit and 16-bit is immaterial unless you are doing some fairly significant pushing in post. As a starting point it is obviously meaningless if you are shooting jpg on your camera, and essentially meaningless if you are just doing basic, straightforward conversions of the raw files and little more than tht.
- When _really_ pushing the raw files — as in a LOT — it might make an extraordinarily subtle difference in a few edge cases. Maybe. If you looked really close. Or measured rather than looked.
- in this cases it _could_ be one factor affecting color. As we know, that last bit is always an approximation. The actual luminosity in the area represented by a pixel lies somewhere between the recorded value of that last bit and the second-closest bit. So things always get rounded slightly. It is conceivable that if, for example, the source was precisely gray, that this rounding of the R, G, and B values could introduce slight (VERY slight) color to that gray. You would never notice this in an image that isn’t pushed in post. However, if you took, say, a near black tone (from the part of the luminosity range that is represented by a smaller range of values) and then pushed the crap out of it — like 5 or 6 stops or more — then your “black” color might start to shift a very tiny bit. Maybe.
- Here, though, we get to the difference between what the numbers tell us (that due to that last bit being an approximation, inaccuracies are necessarily introduced, that the representation of luminosity in color channels is not perfectly accurate, and that extraordinary pushing of those values can amplified differences) and what we see in actual photographs (not much at all, if anything, actually).
No digital system _perfectly_ represents anything, but they can reduce the magnitude of the inaccuracy to the point at which the error introduced by approximation is not perceptible.
I guess that if you have 16 bits available and there’s no cost (in speed, memory, money) that bothers you, why not? It doesn’t hurt, right? But does it make a meaningful difference in the end to go from 14 bit to 16 bit? Not likely.
(I just imagined us back here in 10 years debating whether going from 48 bits to 50 bits is the ne plus ultra of photography…)
Apr 23, 2025 at 09:29 AM
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