Digital BW, The Print

> From: Manuel Toledo Quinones [mailto:mtoledo@...]
>
> Usually shoots digital raw to preserve 16 bits per channel and avoid
> deterioration when processing the images. However, it occurs to me
> that if one is shooting color with 8 bits/channel, there are already
> 24 bits of information. If the image is then converted to 16 bit
> grayscale mode, all bits contain information and there should be no
> empty bins in the histogram due to lack of intensity resolution. The
> quality of the 16 bit image should be adequate to tolerate processing.

Not true. With three channels of 8 bits, that's roughly equal to 9.5 bits,
because the maximum value you can get by adding three 255's together is 765,
which takes about 9.5 bits to represent.

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Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...