Two Minute Tips: Canon on why bit depth matters, how to make black and white prints and much more

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posted Thursday, July 13, 2017 at 1:00 PM EST

This spring, Canon launched a new video series dubbed "Two Minute Tips" in which a pair of Canon pros, Max and Nick, help answer frequently asked questions about photography and printing. It's a really cool idea and the pair have already released a handful of videos, covering a range of topics from Canon's Print Studio Pro software to 8-bit versus 16-bit images and more, so let's take a look at their videos.

The first video I saw in the series was their 8-bit versus 16-bit printing video. What the heck is going on with bits, anyways? Consider first an 8-bit image, it has 256 levels of gradation per color and three colors (red, green and blue), so 256 to the power of 3 gives you access to a total of 16.7 million colors. That certainly is a lot. But what about a 16-bit image? A 16-bit file has 65,536 levels of gradation per color and performing the same math, that results in a possible 281 trillion colors. Human eyes cannot even detect all 16.7 million possible colors in an 8-bit image, so why bother with 16-bit? It's all about smoother gradation, especially when you start performing edits to an image. Ultimately you want as much data as possible and you want the final image, or print, to have smooth tonal transitions. Check out the video below to learn more.

If you're interested in printing and want to learn more about black and white printing in particular, check out this other new video in Canon's Two Minute Tips series. Scroll down further to see the rest of their new videos.