Bit Depth
The number of bits used to represent color information per pixel. Higher bit depth enables more colors and smoother gradients.
Bit depth indicates the amount of color data each pixel holds. At 8 bits per channel, each color channel represents 256 levels (0-255), yielding approximately 16.7 million colors across RGB. At 16 bits per channel, each channel offers 65,536 levels for vastly richer tonal gradation.
Photo editing workflows use 16-bit or 32-bit (HDR) to minimize tonal degradation from tone curves and exposure adjustments. Converting to 8-bit for final output is standard practice. Aggressive color corrections at 8-bit often produce banding (tone jumps).
Web delivery standardizes on 8 bits per channel. PNG supports both 8-bit and 16-bit, while JPEG is limited to 8-bit. The image conversion tool may automatically downsample bit depth during format conversion.