[Gimp-user] Image bit depth

[Joao S. O. Bueno]

On Wednesday 16 January 2008 07:58, Thomas Worthington wrote:
>On Wed, 16 Jan 2008 10:25:39 -0000, 7willows <7willows at dsl.pipex.com>  
wrote:
> > As CPUs are now primarily 64bit (I am running Solaris 10 x86 as a
> > 64bit OS) could the design of GIMP be adjusted so that maximum
> > image bit depth becomes user selectable 32 or 64bit? As a lapsed
> > programmer (only using sh and no compiled language for over 10
> > years) I fully appreciate it is not a simple fix.

Adding to Thomas answer: the larger integer size in CPUs being 64 bit 
has absolutely  nothing to do with the pixel depth a program can use.
One could write a program to manipulate images in which each pixel was 
represented by a 5 X 64 bit in an 8 bit machinne.

But, answering you both: yes, current gimp trunk is using GEGL for 
some color operations, which are them performed at 32bit floating 
point precision.  Version 2.6, which will come out this year will 
implement that, but likely it won support saving in more than 8bit 
per channel.

If you are working with monochrome, and 16 bit final output formats 
would indeed make a difference, I suggest increasing your resolution 
by a factor of 2 or 4 to overcome this.

	js
	-><-