Heres a thing that bugs me that most of you wont take the time to read. A lot of people think that the terms 8-bit and 16-bit have to do with the resolution of the game/picture/whatever, which is super wrong. It has to do with how many colors are able to be displayed by the software. All color is made up from 3 primaries: red, blue, and green. The amount of bits, when it comes to graphics, represents 2^x intensities of each primary, x being the amount of bits. 1 bit gets you 2 colors, seeing as 2^1=2, meaning you get two intensities of each primary, essentially on or off; black or white. with 8-bit, you get 2^8 intensities of each primary, 256. So with 8 bits per component and 3 components, you get 256^3= roughly 16.8 million available colors that can be displayed. Meaning with 16 bits you have 2^16, 65,536 intensities of each primary, meaning a total of roughly 281 trillion available colors. Its estimated that the human eye can only recognize roughly 10 million colors at best, so why are 16.8 million, or even 281 trillion even somewhat necessary? Furthermore, why does the difference matter? Have you ever been working on something in Photoshop or mspaint in 8-bit mode and noticed that after a certain amount of editing you end up with a pixely line where the colors dont blend right and its as if theres a visible line between each color? This is called banding. When youve changed so much that the colors dont appear to blend anymore, because the slight differences in tonal values are unavailable in that color pallete. There are only 16.8 million colors available in 8-bits, and when it comes to shading, the inbetween colors are extremely important. So we pump it up to 281 trillion possible colors, and those banding issues are a thing of the past. Flexibility of the colors easily multiplied by about 16.8 million. This has been your science lesson of the day.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 02:58:43 +0000
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