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bit/color depth

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bit/color depth (In French profondeur de pixel/d’échantillonnage) number of lightness levels which a pixel can adopt; “bit depth” means the data depth in a color channel, e.g. “8 bits” means 8 bits per pixel (8 bpp) = 2⁸ = 256 grayscales; “color depth” in an image file, on the other hand, means the number of color channels times pixel depth, “8 bits” then means = 2⁸ × 1 = 256 grayscales, that is, a monochrome grayscale image; an RGB file has 2⁸ × 3 = 2²⁴ = 16.7 million color shades (truecolor), a CMYK file 2⁸ × 4 = 2³² = 4.3 billion color shades. In the Photoshop CIELAB mode, it is still only possible to represent 8 bpp, so that 16-bit image data should be processed and forwarded using the RGB color space. In the hardware calibration of widegamut monitors, 10 bits are ideal for a detailed color space description.