PEED

Understanding Bit Depth

You may have heard the terms 8-bit and 16-bit tossed
around in graphics circles (and neither has anything to do
with Photoshop being a 64-bit program, as the box on
page 6 explains). When people refer to bits, theyre talking
about how many colors an image file contains.
Photoshops color modes (page 46) determine whether
your document is an 8- or a 16-bit image (other, less
common options are 1-bit and 32-bit). Since youll run
into these labels fairly often, it helps to understand more
about what these numbers mean.
A bit is the smallest unit of measurement that computers
use to store information. Each pixel in an image has a bit
depth, which controls how much color information that
pix-el can hold. So an images bit depth determines how
much color info the image contains. The higher the bit
depth, the more colors the image can display. And the
more colors in your image, the more info (details) youve
got to play with in Photoshop.
Understanding bit depth also means you need to know a
little about channels, where Photoshop stores your
images color info (see Chapter 5) on separate layers
(Chapter 3). For example, in an RGB image you have
three channels: one each for red, green, and blue. If you
combine the info contained in each channel, you can
figure how many colors are in your image.
With all that in mind, heres a quick tour of your various bit
choices in Photoshop:
In Bitmap color mode, your pixels can be only black
or white. Images in this mode are called 1-bit images
because each pixel can be only one colorblack or
white (theyre also known simply as bitmap images).
An 8-bit image can hold two values in each bit, which
equals 256 possible color values. Why 256? Since
each of the eight bits can hold two possible values,
you get 256 combinations. (For math fans: its two to
the eighth power, which equals 256). Images in
Gray-scale mode contain one channel, so thats 8 bits
per channel, equaling 256 colors. Since images in
RGB

mode contain three channels (one each for red,

blue, and green), folks refer to them as 24-bit
images (8 bits per channel 3 = 24), but theyre still
really just 8-bit images. With 256 combinations for
each chan-nel (thats 28 28 28), you can have
over 16 million colors in your RGB image. Since
CMYK images have four channels, folks refer to
them as 32-bit images (8 bits per channel 4 = 32),
but again, these are still 8-bit images. Over 200
combinations per channel and four channels add up
to a massive number of possible color values, but
since youre dealing with printed ink, your color
range in CMYK is dictated by what can actually be
reproduced on paper, which re-duces it to about
55,000 colors.
16-bit images contain 65,536 colors in a single channel and are produced by some high-end digital
cameras (digital single-lens reflex, or dSLR, cameras)
shooting in Raw format (page 57) or by really good
scanners. These files dont look any different from
other images on your screen, but they take up twice
as much hard drive space. Photographers really like
them because the extra colors give them more flexibility when theyre making Curves and Levels adjustments (see Chapter 9), even though the larger file
sizes can really slow Photoshop down. Also, not all of
Photoshops tools and filters work with 16-bit images,
but that list of tools grows with each new version of
the program.
32-bit images, referred to as high dynamic range
(HDR), contain more colors than you can shake a
stick at. See page 414 for more info.
For the most part, youll deal with 8-bit images, but if
youve got a camera that shoots at higher bit depths, by
all means, take a weekend and experiment to see if the
difference in quality is worth the sacrifice of hard drive
space (and edit-ing speed). And if youre restoring a really
old photo, it may be helpful to scan it at a high bit depth
so you have a wider range of colors to work with. See the
box on page 57 for more scanning tips.

chapter 2: opening, viewing, and saving files