There are a lot of "depends" going on here-- If you're doing digital printing, or heavy image manipulation, it might be necessary, but generally speaking, 24 bit should be enough to avoid banding. I certainly haven't run into it even when I was using the "basic" version of Silverfast.
Silverfast SE and SE+ scan at 16 bits per channel and save at 8 bits per channel. Silverfast AI Studio scans and saves at 16 bits per channel. Epson scan scans and saves at 16 bits per channel.I believe all versions scan at 48, and down-sample to 24.
Nit pick away!To pick a nit,
I've always scanned color negative and chromes at 48 bits. I do it because people like you recommend it. I believe that there's more chance of banding when scanning let's say 35mm film than 120 or even large format film like 4x5 or 8x10. Is that true?again, I’m not familiar with the software, but if it’s high bit depth all the way up to the point of saving, then you’re very unlikely to see any banding or posterization. I suspect that might be the case since you say you’ve never seen any banding. If it’s 8 bits through and through, you will see banding, especially if scanning negative film. 8 bits per color channel isn’t enough discrete tone values to avoid it. Your highlights will look chunky and noisy.
I've always scanned color negative and chromes at 48 bits. I do it because people like you recommend it. I believe that there's more chance of banding when scanning let's say 35mm film than 120 or even large format film like 4x5 or 8x10. Is that true?
So I scan at 48 bit and then save through Lightroom I believe at 48 bit as well (for color chromes and negatives.) If I post on the web, then I save as sRGB in a reduced resolution. What happens to the resultant file then?No. Format size doesn’t really make a difference. You can pick up more discrete tone values if you resize the scanned image to a smaller size (downscaling it), but only if you first convert it to 48 bit color, then scale it down, then convert it back to 24 bit color.
in the end, if you’re not going to do any color manipulation, you can scan it at 48 bit color, then save it as 24 bit color. The only real limitation at that point is your color space, which would be sRGB or Adobe RGB if saving 24 bit color. If you want to use a larger color space like ProPhoto, I strongly recommend staying in 48 bit color.
So I scan at 48 bit and then save through Lightroom I believe at 48 bit as well (for color chromes and negatives.) If I post on the web, then I save as sRGB in a reduced resolution. What happens to the resultant file then?
If I intend to use as part of a video slide show using Adobe Premiere Elements video editing program, I save as sRGB at an 4K resolution. What happens to the resultant file then?
Wouldn't I be better off working completely in sRGB if the end result is sRGB to the web? If I shoot digital or process and scan film in let's say Adobe RGB or ProPhoto, won't the colors switch to something unknown when I make the final sRGB file?sRGB is a relatively small color space, so if you save as sRGB, it will get converted to the smaller color space. Any colors that are outside of the sRGB gamut will be changed. How they change will depend on the rendering intent you have set for the color space conversion. Going from 48 bit to 24 bit isn't so much of a big deal as the gamma of sRGB is ~2.4, which lets you encode about 12 stops of dynamic range into the 8 bits worth of tone values. Your whites will be really white, and your blacks will be pretty black, assuming you have a display that can actually display 12+ stops of dynamic range.
In video land, the color space is rec.709, which is the same size and has the same primaries as sRGB, so it'll be the same as sRGB in terms of how the colors look. The gamma for rec.709 video isn't the same as sRGB, but they both are about 12 stops of dynamic range.
All that said, sRGB has been the display standard for a really long time, and rec.709 will be for quite a while as well. That's all most of us have been seeing for quite a while and we don't know any better. If you have a monitor that can actually display AdobeRGB or ProPhoto and you do color work, you'll discover pretty quickly just how small and how few colors sRGB actually displays relative to much larger color spaces. The difference is actually being able to display and see those colors, but if you've never seen a display that does, you don't know any better. There's nothing wrong with that though. People have been looking at sRGB for the last 15-20 years and very few if any people have been making much noise over the size of the color space.
Wouldn't I be better off working completely in sRGB if the end result is sRGB to the web? If I shoot digital or process and scan film in let's say Adobe RGB or ProPhoto, won't the colors switch to something unknown when I make the final sRGB file?
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