Nate Loc: Ann Arbor, Mi.

I work primarily in B&W, shoot Raw and my files are large 45 MB or larger. So, I am fine on resolution and have plenty of headroom for pp. At 8 uncompressed bit depth, I get 256 shades of gray. If working in color, the importance of 16 or 32 (HDR) bit pixels with discrete values in millions is understandable. But, how about B&W? I have checked RGB cannels in 16 bits and greater, even, and don’t see obvious out come differences in gray tones when compared to 8 bit. Am I missing something here? That’s the reason for the inquiry.

Brian Platt Loc: Poole/Verwood, Dorset, UK

Are you printing or saving for screen use? When printing 8 bit is far enough. If it were me i would shoot at 16 bit and then convert to 8 bit on output for printing.

Nate Loc: Ann Arbor, Mi.

I don't do my own printing. A pro w/ proper printer equipment does my printing using the final tiff image. But I do enter magazine and other competitions. And that has gone rather well. Entries go in by burning onto disk, and if published, they come out looking well. I keep my screen calibrated by calibration device. So all of that is in place. Arguably, my inquiry may be more of academic curiosity than practical pp utility. I think.

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

You should be fine 99% of the time using 8-bit images. About the only time you might have problems is when taking images with a lot of sky or something with a lot of one color. If you see banding in your B&W image, then try 16-bit.

hfb Loc: Northwestern Louisiana

You get less than %10, of the 256 levels in 8 bits, as grey shades. That is plenty.

Nate Loc: Ann Arbor, Mi.

I have now concluded that 8 bit is insufficient for a good B&W. I have experimented and have now come to the conclusion that, if we have a fine-art B&W image in mind, we should go well beyond 8 bit depth. My images that have been put through HDR and are worked on at 32 bit depth have always been superior to those that were single 14 bit from my D7100, I then decided to take three identical images and put them through HDR and found that tone mapping and enhancement was improved at 32 bit over a single image at 14 or 8 bit. Also, I looked through Michael Freeman's Complete Guide to B&W Photography. He says, in fact, that B&W has more to gain from HDR than color; then, as an aside suggestions, advises juicing up single BW Tiff images to 32 bit at the beginning of pp and, as with HDR, provides histograms, etc., to backup his position. And, that coincides with my trial and error experiments.