For photographers deciding what to shoot and what to deliver. Checked against CullTone on 20 Oct 2026.
Bit depth is how many steps a file has between black and white. More steps means smoother gradients and more room to push an edit before something breaks. It is also the source of some of the most repeated, least understood numbers in photography.
Each level count is 2 to the power of the bit depth. The colour figure is that count cubed, one for each of red, green and blue. The bars grow with the bit depth, not with the count; drawn to scale, the 8-bit bar would be invisible.
You'll read that a 14-bit RAW holds 4.4 trillion colours. It doesn't, in any useful sense. A camera sensor sits behind a mosaic of red, green and blue filters, and each photosite records one number: how much light got through its own filter. Full colour for each pixel is rebuilt later from its neighbours. The 4.4 trillion is just 16,384 multiplied by itself three times, a count of combinations no single RAW ever stores pixel by pixel.
The real gain is finer steps of brightness, and that matters most in the shadows.
A sensor counts light in a straight line: twice the light, twice the number. Each stop down from the brightest one halves the light, so it also gets half the levels. In a 14-bit file, the top stop alone takes half of all 16,384 levels.
| Stop below clipping | Levels | What usually lives there |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 8,192 | Bright sky, a white gown in sun |
| 2nd | 4,096 | Bright skin, highlights on faces |
| 3rd | 2,048 | Midtones |
| 4th | 1,024 | Darker skin in shade, foliage |
| 5th | 512 | Suits, hair, the edges of a dance floor |
| 6th to 8th | 256, 128, 64 | Deep shadows, where noise also lives |
A JPEG stores brightness on a curve instead of a straight line, spreading its 256 levels more evenly across the stops. That is why an 8-bit JPEG looks fine straight out of the camera. The trouble starts when you ask it to move: lift the shadows two stops and you are stretching a handful of levels across a wide range, and the gaps between them show.
An illustration, exaggerated so it reads on any screen. Real banding is subtler and shows first in skies, studio backdrops and smoke.
We'd argue that bit depth matters less than the forums say for a well-exposed frame with a gentle edit. Most of the time, noise limits a shadow push before the levels run out. You will see it in:
12-bit against 14-bit is a smaller gap still. Many cameras record 12-bit in fast burst modes, and in ordinary light it is hard to tell the files apart. The bigger cost of 14-bit is space: more data per frame on the card and on every backup drive.
The working rule is simple. Do the heavy lifting on the file with the most levels, then write the 8-bit JPEG once, at the end. Every round trip through 8 bits throws levels away. CullTone works that way: the previews you cull and edit on are small JPEGs, but every finished photo is rendered from your original file at full size and written once as a JPEG at quality 95, in sRGB.
Clients get 8-bit JPEGs because every phone, browser and print lab opens them. Newer formats can carry more than 8 bits, but a gallery has to open on whatever phone the couple's grandmother owns. For the colour space side of the same decision, read sRGB, Adobe RGB or Display P3.
One honest cost. Keeping the RAW files means keeping big files. Plan the drives.
Cull and edit on fast previews; every finished photo is rendered from your original at full size.