Similarly to computer displays there are wide gamut printers that make use of the 16 bit data. As far as I know, there is nothing in Yosemite to indicate that this has changed.
Adobe illustrator 16 bit mac#
If you are a MAC user, unfortunately, there is no support for deeper bit-depths in the operating system. To use those, however, you must also make sure that your graphic card, cables, and operating system supports a deeper-than-8 color depth as well.
Adobe illustrator 16 bit professional#
Some professional grade displays have support for 10 bits of color data per channel. This means that even if you chose to edit in 16-bit, the tonal values you see, are going to be limited by your computer and display. Unfortunately most typical desktop displays only support 8 bits of color data per channel. Which in turn could lead to banding and unwanted color variations. If you get gaps such as the histogram above, then you don’t have a smooth tonal spread. Meaning if you go one direction with your color then decide to go back, you will risk losing some of the original data, and ending up with ‘gaps in the histogram’. The risk of editing in 8-bit is that you could lose information if you were to push and pull on your edits. (As I explained earlier, this histogram actually represents a larger range in 16-bit mode 0 to 32768) At the far left the tonal value is 0 and at the far right the tonal value is 255, giving you a range of 8 bits. When you look at a histogram of an image you are looking at its tonal range. Now let’s try that in 16 bit setting (BPC), now we have 6,400 steps and can render a much smoother image! Tonal Range This is what would happen if we were working in 8 bit (BPC) setting – just 50 steps. If you stretch that out over a larger distance you are definitely going to see banding. If you want to go between tonal value 50 and 100, there are only 50 possible steps. If you have 2 bits, you can add 66% black and 33% black, but still it will not be a smooth transition.
If we take this to extreme, imagine that if you only had a bit depth of one bit the gradient you have at your disposal is really limited: either black or white. The lower the bit depth, and the closer the start and end tonal values are to each other, the bigger risk of getting banding. If your colors are limited you are going to see a banding effect, like so: To get a smooth graduation between to tones, you need the space in between those tones to have enough width to hide the graduation. So, pure green, for example, in 8-bit is.
Adobe illustrator 16 bit full#
Behind the scenes it utilizes the full value range. This is purely to simplify things for the user. Note: Photoshop will often show a color value between 0 to 255 per channel regardless of what bit depth you edit in. Again, this may seem like an overkill, but if you consider the neutral color gradient again, the maximum amount of tonal values is ‘only’ 65,536. More than 16 million times more numerical values then the 8-bit setting. The available number of pixel values here is mind boggling (2^48). Similarly the 16-bit setting (BPC) would result in 48-bits per pixel (BPP). Those artifacts are called posterization.
But if you consider that a neutral (single color) gradient can only have 256 different values, you will quickly understand why similar tones in an 8-bit image can cause artifacts. Meaning that each pixel can have values ranging from 0 to 16,777,215, representing about 16 million colors.Īs the human eye can only discern about 10 million different colors, this sounds like a lot. This means that the 8-bit setting (BPC) is in fact 24-bits per pixel (BPP). But to complicate things the ‘bit depth’ setting when editing images, specifies the number of bits used for each color channel – bits per channel (BPC). If you were to put it on a graph, this is what it would look like:īits per channel are pretty easy to understand, it is the number of bit used to represent one of the color channels (Red, Green, Blue). To give you a general idea, a comparison 16 bits can contain 256 times more numerical values then 8 bits. For the purpose of this article this is not that big of a deal though, so I am going to show the difference to 16-bits to keep things simple. If you look at the built in information panel it allows you to swap to 16-bit view and it then shows 0-32768 values. Sidenote: Photoshop does not seem to be using the full range of those 16-bits. (or 2 to the power of 16) This allows for numeric values ranging from 0 to 65535. Similarly 16-bit means the data size is 16 bits in total. This allows for numeric values ranging from 0 to 255. 8-bit simply means the data chunk is 8 bits in total (or 2 to the power of 8, as each bit can be either ‘1’ or ‘0’). It can only contain two values, typically 0 or 1.
A ‘bit’ is a computer term for data storage.