8 bit images you have 256 levels of grade.
For the sake of this conversation, before I even start talking about 16 bit, I have to say that when you color correct on an 8 bit image, you start getting rid of those levels. You need about 170 levels of grade in order for you to start having a nice and smooth transition. And the minute you go below those levels, you can posterize or you can start breaking.
Now, the 16 bit, instead of having 256, you have 65,000.
So you have a lot of headroom. You have a lot of room to do heavy color correction. To go into your own type of color grading or any color correction like levels, curves. you won’t run out of levels to be able to dial in the color the way you want to.
Here at the Icon. We have two types of clients.
Clients that want us to finish the work, which means, color correcting it and adjusting it the way they want to. We prefer that they provide us with a color reference so we can come close or match what they gave us. Move it towards the color hue or just color balance the scan and then dial in the contrast of the blacks and the white.
Now we also have clients that want to do everything themselves. They just want the negatives or chromes, E6, digitized. And what they want is basically the full dynamic range raw scan, meaning that no highlights or shadows have been clipped so they can take it to their studio and they can color correct it. Now, what we do here is give you a scan that has been neutralized and balanced properly. But we don’t go into shadows or highlights and dial those up. So you don’t have to worry about your highlights being clip or your shadows being clip. So everything that we give you when you order a 16 bit raw scan, the whole dynamic range will be there for you to dial in the way you want to color grade yourself.
So for clients that want us to basically dial in the color contrast we strongly suggest that they provide us with some kind of color reference that can be a digital file or it can be a contact sheet, because this will tell us which direction we need to move the scan to. If you care about a particular color hue that you want so we can move that scan towards that direction it would be a lot easier if you need to make minor color corrections at your studio.
