[Digikam-users] Digikam internal precision?

[gerlos]

Il giorno 20/gen/2010, alle ore 16.39, Gilles Caulier ha scritto:

> This is why, working with RAW file is interresting here. RAW is 12/14
> bits color depth format. digiKam store it as 16 bits color depth
> internally. All manipulation are processed with 16 bits. It's
> definitively better than 8 bits.
> 
> At end you export to 8 bits with JPEG.

Ok. If you have from the start more informations, you don't want to waste them in the calculations working in 8 bits. 
But the point is *also* that you want to lose as less information is possible when you edit any image, since usually we do more than just one operation on our photos. 

If for example we do some blurring on a 8 bit image, we get always 256 shades of gray. In some next operation, for example levels adjust, we could reduce it to 200 shades of gray.
But if we convert the same image to 16 bits and then we apply the same blurring, we get 65536 shades of gray, isn't it? If we do some other operations next, we still have a lot of shades to work with, and this could help preserve detail in dark or light areas, no? Even 30000 shades, less than the initial dynamics, are a LOT of informations.

So this could be useful if we do more operations on the images, don't you think?

bye 
gerlos