Quote:
Originally posted by andrewas:
What do you need that bit depth for? The human eye can't perieve 2^32 colours, even if you could get a monitor to display it.
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I'm using a number of 16 bit per channel input devices (both 16 bit grayscale and 48-bit color), and dropping those images back to 8 bit per channel for viewing loses a lot of data, some areas of an image might have significant information that is being "lost in translation" when I give up those 8 bits. The human eye is indeed capable of seeing more than 256 shades of a color, and it is especially sensitive to edges. Open up photoshop and create two squares, one of grayscale value 128, one of 129. Seperate them on a white background and try to decide which is darker... you can't. Next place them so they're touching eachother, now you will easily be able to determine which is the darker by comparing them relative to eachother right at the interface point.
Photoshop is now capable of working on 16 bit per channel images, I'd like an output device that can display it also, although admittedly those sorts of bit depths are of limited use.