8-bit or 16-bit
Submitted by Christopher Glick on Wed, 2008-01-02 11:27.
I am a hobbyist panographer with little to no experience with graphic editing software. To date I have been using batch processing my RAW images as 16-bit TIFF files. PTMac gives me good results, but I have a small dilemma: I don't yet have a 16-bit graphic editor (neither GraphicConverter nor GIMP can handle the task, yet).
Over the next couple of weeks, I will try remake some of my 16-bit panoramas as 8-bit to see how the results differ.
Re: 8-bit or 16-bit
Submitted by Hans Nyberg on Wed, 2008-01-02 17:10.Do you have an old version?
As far as I can see GraphicConverter has had support for 16bit for many years.
I can not see if it has for layers.
Hans
Re: 8-bit or 16-bit
Submitted by Christopher Glick on Thu, 2008-01-03 03:09.Dear Hans,
Thank you for your reply.
From Canon Digital Photo Professional, I export RAW images as 16-bit TIFF files that I feed into PTMac. When I open them in GraphicConverter 6.0.3, I get the following message:
"The file "K2_001.TIF" was saved with 16 bit for each channel. This was reduced to 8 bit upon import. So, please remember this if you save the file."
Here my ignorance of graphics rears its head. GC says the above file is 32-bit ("16.7 Million Colors", GC says) and about 30MB; if I choose Picture:Colors:Change to 32768 Colors (16 bit), the file size is cut in half but I see no noticeable difference despite halving the data.
Looking through this, it seems that DPP's "16 bit" means per channel, whereas GC's "16 bit" means both channels. Confusing, that. So I've been apparently been talking about 32-bit when I thought I was talking about 16-bit, which probably means I can go back and convert many files to a half their current size.
Hopefully I have just learned something very basic but vital, all thanks to your stimulating response.