Digital BW, The Print

"You are quoting things again that are not true"

 'Again'?

 What are you referring to John? Be specific. If you are going to take
a shot at me, be specific.

  As I said,  I could not tell a 16 bit from an 8 bit print. Not one
of my discerning photographer friends could tell a 16 bit from an 8
bit print. If neither myself nor any of my 3 critical photographer
friends can tell an 8 bit from a 16 bit print, I'm not going to store
finished images at 16 bits. I value most what my eyes tell me
regarding image quality. The prints made from 8-bit files look just great!
 I welcome you to store your images in 16 bit format. But, I would
seriously doubt that one can tell the difference between a 16 bit and
8 bit print. 
 Let's really investigate the matter...setup a double blind study.
Let's do it. It must truly be double-blinded. Prints made from 16 bit
files vs. prints made from 8 bit files from the same image. Let's see
if anyone can consistently tell the difference.
  
  Best Regards
  Ginny

 
--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "John Moody"
<moodymz3@...> wrote:
>
> Ginny,
> You are quoting things again that are not true; print drivers are
not _only_
> 8-bit.  There are print drivers with a complete 16-bit pipeline;
this has
> been discussed numerous times.
> 
> I have owned an LS-8000 for years, and I'm also a member of that
list.  Your
> impression that "The vast majority of people agree" 8 bits is enough, is
> generally opposite of my impression, but that's OK, I just hope that
people
> consider the few pennies saved on storage before they toss away so many
> tones.
> 
> 16-bit storage is required if you want to preserve the quality of
the scan
> you just made, period.
> 
> Best regards,
> John Moody
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
> [mailto:DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com]On Behalf Of
> ginnylady33
> Sent: Monday, March 20, 2006 6:32 PM
> To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [Digital BW] Re: Archiving images on DVD?
> 
> Th topic of 8 vs 16 bit storage has been discussed extensively on the
> LS-9000 forum. The vast majority of people agree that there is no
> point storing images that have already been corrected at 16 bits. 8
> bits is just fine.
> A quote follows from the conclusion of the thread.
> 
> As with everything, there will be other opinions.
> 
> In truth, I tried hard looking at prints made from 8 bit and 16 bit
> files and there was no difference visible. I then asked 3 photographer
> friends if they could pick out the 16 bit prints and they could not.
> End of story for me.
> (The guys I asked are really good and have critical/discerning eyes.)
> 
> "Storing and printing 8 bit vs. 16 bit will never show any difference
> because the printer driver only works in 8 bit. However, if you open
> an image and do any extensive editing of the colors, retouching faces,
> or any transformation of the RGB values into other values you can then
> run into posterization problems. Think of it this way. Adjusting 256
> shades (8 bit) into 128 shades has lost half of the visible(?)
> information. Converting both results to 8 bit for printing will only
> result in an error of 1 or 2 out of 128 and you can't probably see it.
> Transforming 65,535 shades (16 bit)  into half the space gives 32,765
> remaining shades. To visualize the issue, set your monitor card to
> High Color (16 bit) and view some of your pictures that have nice
> blends (blue sky or skin tones) and then look at the same in True
> Color (32 bit). You can see the difference. If it didn't matter, our
> monitor cards would still be only 4 bits per RGB color.
> 
> The bottom line is that 16 bit storage is only appropriate if you will
> want to do significant editing to the image before printing it. When
> printed or viewed you cannot see the difference because the devices
> are only 8 bits, 256 shades of each color."
> 
> Best Regards
> Ginny
> 
> 
> 
> 
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>