Color Modes

A digital image file contains numeric values for each of the pixels in an image. The color mode defines which system is used to describe the pixel values in an image and how the pixel values are organized. Images in grayscale mode can only be black and white, while color images generally use RGB, CMYK, or Lab color mode. In the camera, only the RGB color mode is used, but this can be changed during editing and printing.

Grayscale

As the name implies, the grayscale color mode is for images that don't contain any color. An 8-bit grayscale image can contain 256 possible shades of gray, while a 16-bit grayscale image can theoretically contain up to 65,536 shades. You may think that fine-art black and white photography is just black and ...

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