Digital BW, The Print

Ginny,
You are quoting things again that are not true; print drivers are not _only_
8-bit.  There are print drivers with a complete 16-bit pipeline; this has
been discussed numerous times.

I have owned an LS-8000 for years, and I’m also a member of that list.  Your
impression that “The vast majority of people agree” 8 bits is enough, is
generally opposite of my impression, but that’s OK, I just hope that people
consider the few pennies saved on storage before they toss away so many
tones.

16-bit storage is required if you want to preserve the quality of the scan
you just made, period.

Best regards,
John Moody

-----Original Message-----
From: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com]On Behalf Of
ginnylady33
Sent: Monday, March 20, 2006 6:32 PM
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Digital BW] Re: Archiving images on DVD?

Th topic of 8 vs 16 bit storage has been discussed extensively on the
LS-9000 forum. The vast majority of people agree that there is no
point storing images that have already been corrected at 16 bits. 8
bits is just fine.
A quote follows from the conclusion of the thread.

As with everything, there will be other opinions.

In truth, I tried hard looking at prints made from 8 bit and 16 bit
files and there was no difference visible. I then asked 3 photographer
friends if they could pick out the 16 bit prints and they could not.
End of story for me.
(The guys I asked are really good and have critical/discerning eyes.)

"Storing and printing 8 bit vs. 16 bit will never show any difference
because the printer driver only works in 8 bit. However, if you open
an image and do any extensive editing of the colors, retouching faces,
or any transformation of the RGB values into other values you can then
run into posterization problems. Think of it this way. Adjusting 256
shades (8 bit) into 128 shades has lost half of the visible(?)
information. Converting both results to 8 bit for printing will only
result in an error of 1 or 2 out of 128 and you can't probably see it.
Transforming 65,535 shades (16 bit)  into half the space gives 32,765
remaining shades. To visualize the issue, set your monitor card to
High Color (16 bit) and view some of your pictures that have nice
blends (blue sky or skin tones) and then look at the same in True
Color (32 bit). You can see the difference. If it didn't matter, our
monitor cards would still be only 4 bits per RGB color.

The bottom line is that 16 bit storage is only appropriate if you will
want to do significant editing to the image before printing it. When
printed or viewed you cannot see the difference because the devices
are only 8 bits, 256 shades of each color."

Best Regards
Ginny




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