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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bob Blaylock" data-source="post: 356248" data-attributes="member: 16749">There's something that it had just occurred to me to add to this thread, before I read your posting, but I'll quote your posting because I think what I had to add relates somewhat to it; and perhaps gives me a  better context in which to express the significance thereof  Assuming my understanding is correct, each pixel in a Raw/.NEF file contains only one color component—red, blue or green—according to its position in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter" target="_blank">Bayer filter</a> pattern.  Each pixel on the camera's sensor is sensitive to only one color—red, blue, or green; and each pixel in the resulting Raw file records the brightness that the sensor saw for just that one color at that pixel.By contrast, most color image formats, such as .JPG, contain, three different values in each pixel, for each of the three color components.  Thus, an “8-bit” .JPG actually contains 24 bits for each pixel—8 bits for red, 8 bits for blue, 8 bits for green.  So an “8-bit” .JPG file already is able to contain more information about the image than even a 14-bit .NEF file with the same number of pixels.  In converting from a Raw file to a format such as .JPG, part of the process involves, for each pixel, interpolating its value for the two colors that it does not cover, from the neighboring pixels.  In the process, we go from every pixel having either 4096 or 16384 possible values, representing the brightness of only one of the three colors, to every pixel having 16,777,216 possible values, representing 256 brightness levels for each of three colors.</blockquote>

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