Re: 16-bit vs 8-bit to Epson printers
Re: 16-bit vs 8-bit to Epson printers
- Subject: Re: 16-bit vs 8-bit to Epson printers
- From: Robert L Krawitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 19:29:28 -0400
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 16:12:14 -0400
From: Lee Hershenson <email@hidden>
Much of this very active interchange puzzles me, partly because I
am a photographer who is just beginning to learn some of the
technical details of digital work. I do realize that there are
stages in the processing of an image where visible artifacts are
less likely to be generated if you have a high-bit file. But if
there were some way you could get your printer actually to produce
a grayscale with more than 256 discrete steps -- or even as many as
128 steps-- I would like to know what isthe basis (with citations,
please) that any of the participants in this discussion have for
believing that that your vision could distinguish that many?
I would argue that the primary issue isn't the number of steps that
your vision can distinguish, but reducing the difference between any
pair of steps to the point where your vision cannot distinguish them.
Try creating a red sweep from 0 to 255 on your monitor; you'll
probably see that at least some adjacent tones are very easy to
distinguish from one another.
Another problem is that color management works by mapping input colors
to output colors. One result of this (if the mapping isn't
idempotent, and it never is) is that colors are skipped in some cases
and duplicated in others. This is accepted, and evidently works
reasonably well, but if it were done in 16 bit resolution this would
be much less of an issue.
Finally, if you want to get a really good grayscale from colored inks,
you may find that even very slight differences in the amount of inks
may yield perceptible color casts. Having more precision here would
give you much finer adjustments.
--
Robert Krawitz <email@hidden>
Tall Clubs International --
http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail email@hidden
Project lead for Gimp Print --
http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net
"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
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