I shoot a Canon 5D Mark ii at the highest quality setting. RAW files on this camera are supposed to be 14 bit, but when I save them on my computer, they are all being converted somehow to 8 bit. I use a kingston card reader. I'm simply copying the images into a file without altering anything. What's going on? How can I save the files at the higher quality that the camera is supposed to be recording them?
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If you are shooting JPEGs, they are by the definition of JPEG, 8-bit images. To get higher bit depth (i.e., to take advantage of the extra detail your A/D converters give you), shoot RAW images. Then, you can import them into a 16-bit per channel color space. |
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You probably need to analyze things step-by-step as your question makes little sense. If you shoot RAW, then your card will contain RAW files. They should have an extension other than JPG. You should be able to confirm this simply by browsing to your card using the operating system file manager. If you see a RAW file (.CRW, .CR2, etc) than you have a RAW file. Period. When you more or copy these files to your computer they are still RAW files. And therefore they are still 14-bit per-component, as opposed to JPEG images which are 8-bits per component. Now, a RAW file is NOT an image. The computer must convert a RAW file into an image before showing it you. This is where you are likely getting confused, depending on the software you use. Most preview software simply display and embedded JPEG preview which is stored inside RAW files. Some will produce an on-the-fly preview based on default conversion parameters. In this case, the preview always has 8-bits per component. This is probably what you are checking and tricking you into thinking you have 8-bit files. When you open a RAW file into a RAW converter, the converted reads the 14-bit and converts it according to the parameters you choose. At this point, it is up to you what you store the processes files as but if you store them as JPEG, only 8-bits per component will be stored since that is all JPEG can handle. Instead you have to choose a higher-bit-depth file-format like TIFF, PNG (16-bit option), OpenEXR, etc. |
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Apart from what Bridge says, once you do upgrade Adobe Camera Raw and open your files, you can set the workflow bit depth along with resolution and color space. There is a link at the bottom of the ACR screen. Clicking on it will allow you to change the default. It should be 16 bit by default, but something to check once you've got a version that will read your RAW files.
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