There was a time when one bit per pixel was enough. Back in that time, there was only one color channel with only one value for each pixel; either on or off. One bit per pixel was sufficient. Next came progressively more graduated gray-scale, up to the 256 levels provided by a one-byte, eight-bit value. This was about the period that I got my first computer, an Apple IIc in all of it’s green-display glory.

Then color came along: red, green, and blue. Now those 8 bits were rationed out; three to green and red and two to blue in the common case¹. Then came 16-bit color, followed by 24-bit color. Now red, green, and blue were on equal footing, each holding 8 bits of information. Soon after came the cake-is-a-lie 32-bit color, which is rarely adds anything more than 24-bit color².

This brings us to today, where most computer monitors advertise the 16.7 million colors afforded by 24-bits of color data. For most of us, this is plenty, as the human eye is estimated to only be able to distinguish 10 million colors. Thus, 8-bits per channel is generally sufficient for displays and is why there haven’t been any big pushes to extend that range³. The issue is no longer one of how many colors but of how broad a gamut of colors.

The standard gamut used in most displays is called sRGB. sRGB is a rather limited gamut but one that has such wide acceptance that, in the absence of any information to the contrary, it is the assumed default for images. It’s a form of least-common-denominator for electronic displays. For most uses that involve a computer display as the means of consumption, using sRGB is sufficient. However, sRGB lacks the ability to represent saturated yellows, greens, and cyans. This shortcoming is readily apparent when it comes to printing images. The printer has a different gamut for CMYK. Some colors that are in sRGB aren’t in CMYK and visa versa. The more saturated blues and yellows that CMYK can print but aren’t represented in sRGB can leave images of the sky and flowers a little under-saturated.

In order to handle the wider range of colors, alternative color spaces must be used with wider gamuts. Examples include Adobe RGB (1998), PhotoPro RGB⁴, and Adobe Wide Gamut RGB. These gamuts allow even more colors to be represented.

Or do they… In an analog system, sure; just as the cardinality of the set of real numbers, , is greater than the cardinality of the set of rational numbers, , so too, the number colors in Adobe Wide Gamut RGB is greater than the number of colors in sRGB in addition to containing all of sRGB even though all those sets have an uncountable number of members.

However, in the digital format, each component is chunked into quanta. For 8-bits, there are 256 distinct values. When you expand the gamut, the number of representable colors remains exactly the same (256), but the distance between quanta of color is larger. Think of it as taking a 24-inch ruler and stretching it. The ruler covers more distance, but there are still only 24 sections on it. There is just more distance between each hash.

When this extended gamut is invariably cast back into a smaller gamut, such as sRGB, the lack of color data resolution causes a phenomenon called posterization. If you’ve ever used 8-bit mode during a remote session on your 24-bit desktop, you’ve seen this effect. The combined effect is somewhat similar to a rounding error.

One way to combat this posterization is to increase the resolution of the color data, e.g. from 8 to 16 bits per channel. With 256 times as many hash marks on the color ruler, the color gamut can easily be expanded to twice its size without causing the banding effect.

As most digital cameras still capture in sRGB and output to 8-bit JPEG, the common photographer has nothing to worry about, but for the more advanced photographer who wishes to have more control over their output, a larger gamut, such as Adobe RGB, and greater resolution are more important. My camera, the Canon Rebel T1i (pictured below) offers an output to RAW format⁵. Each pixel of the sensor has 14-bits of resolution, so it makes little sense to use a working format with less bits per channel. Thus, after importing the RAW file, my working format is Adobe RGB with a 16-bit TIFF. The TIFF format is an uncompressed beast, but it ensures that I don’t lose any of that color data in translation.

Getting the results that you want can be cannily uncomplicated. Most photographers aren’t even worrying about all this as nearly all decision making, aside from composition, is made inside the camera. But when more control is desired, the entire workflow needs to be insulated from introducing error into the process so that the end result is precisely what the photographer intended. And it’s at this time when eight bits really isn’t enough.

1. The reason being that green is primary color to which human eyes are most sensitive, and small changes in green are more easily noted than in red or blue. This fact is further utilized by many steganographic programs which embed information in image files. [↩]
2. There are some 32-bit color implementations that use 30 bits (10 bits per color), but most commonly, the extra 8 bits are used for non-color data or padding. In fact, Windows 7 will support up to 48-bit color, but no graphics cards yet support it; only a few graphics cards currently support 10-bit-per-channel color; and, fewer still monitors can display the 1 billion+ colors available with 30-bit color. [↩]
3. Though, as mentioned in the previous footnote, Windows 7 is breaching that ceiling. Read more about the advance of digital color resolution on Wikipedia [↩]
4. Which uses an ‘imaginary’ blue as one of its primary colors. [↩]
5. A proprietary version of the TIFF format; each manufacturer often has their own proprietary extensions. [↩]