The human eye perceives half scene brightness not as the linear 50% of the present energy (linear nature values) but as 18% of the overall brightness. We are biased to perceive more information in the dark and contrast areas. A Macbeth chart helps with calibrating back into a photographic capture into this “human perspective” of the world.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_gray

 

In photography, painting, and other visual arts, middle gray or middle grey is a tone that is perceptually about halfway between black and white on a lightness scale in photography and printing, it is typically defined as 18% reflectance in visible light

 

Light meters, cameras, and pictures are often calibrated using an 18% gray card[4][5][6] or a color reference card such as a ColorChecker. On the assumption that 18% is similar to the average reflectance of a scene, a grey card can be used to estimate the required exposure of the film.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorChecker

 

 

https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/968/how-can-i-correctly-measure-light-using-a-built-in-camera-meter

 

The exposure meter in the camera does not know whether the subject itself is bright or not. It simply measures the amount of light that comes in, and makes a guess based on that. The camera will aim for 18% gray independently, meaning if you take a photo of an entirely white surface, and an entirely black surface you should get two identical images which both are gray (at least in theory). Thus enters the Macbeth chart.

 

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Note that Chroma Key Green is reasonably close to an 18% gray reflectance.

http://www.rags-int-inc.com/PhotoTechStuff/MacbethTarget/

 

 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/CIE1931xy_ColorChecker_SMIL.svg

 

RGB coordinates of the Macbeth ColorChecker

 

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0e03/251ad1e6d3c3fb9cb0b1f9754351a959e065.pdf

https://www.hdrsoft.com/resources/dri.html#bit-depth

 

The dynamic range is a ratio between the maximum and minimum values of a physical measurement. Its definition depends on what the dynamic range refers to.

For a scene: Dynamic range is the ratio between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene.

For a camera: Dynamic range is the ratio of saturation to noise. More specifically, the ratio of the intensity that just saturates the camera to the intensity that just lifts the camera response one standard deviation above camera noise.

For a display: Dynamic range is the ratio between the maximum and minimum intensities emitted from the screen.

 

The Dynamic Range of real-world scenes can be quite high — ratios of 100,000:1 are common in the natural world. An HDR (High Dynamic Range) image stores pixel values that span the whole tonal range of real-world scenes. Therefore, an HDR image is encoded in a format that allows the largest range of values, e.g. floating-point values stored with 32 bits per color channel. Another characteristics of an HDR image is that it stores linear values. This means that the value of a pixel from an HDR image is proportional to the amount of light measured by the camera.

 

For TVs HDR is great, but it’s not the only new TV feature worth discussing.

 

Wide color gamut, or WCG, is often lumped in with HDR. While they’re often found together, they’re not intrinsically linked. Where HDR is an increase in the dynamic range of the picture (with contrast and brighter highlights in particular), a TV’s wide color gamut coverage refers to how much of the new, larger color gamuts a TV can display.

 

Wide color gamuts only really matter for HDR video sources like UHD Blu-rays and some streaming video, as only HDR sources are meant to take advantage of the ability to display more colors.

 

 

www.cnet.com/how-to/what-is-wide-color-gamut-wcg/

 

Color depth is only one aspect of color representation, expressing the precision with which the amount of each primary can be expressed through a pixel; the other aspect is how broad a range of colors can be expressed (the gamut)

 

Image rendering bit depth

 

Wide color gamuts include a greater number of colors than what most current TVs can display, so the greater a TV’s coverage of a wide color gamut, the more colors a TV will be able to reproduce.

 

When we talk about a color space or color gamut we refer to the range of color values stored in an image. The perception of these color also requires a display that has been tuned with to resolve these color profiles at best. This is often referred to as a ‘viewer lut’.

 

So this comes also usually paired with an increase in bit depth, going from the old 8 bit system (256 shades per color, with the potential of over 16.7 million colors: 256 green x 256 blue x 256 red) to 10  (1024+ shades per color, with access to over a billion colors) or higher bits, like 12 bit (4096 shades per RGB for 68 billion colors).

The advantage of higher bit depth is in the ability to bias color with the minimum loss.

https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/72116/whats-the-point-of-capturing-14-bit-images-and-editing-on-8-bit-monitors

 

For an extreme example, raising the brightness from a completely dark image allows for better reproduction, independently on the reproduction medium, due to the amount of data available at editing time:

For reference, 8-bit images (i.e. 24 bits per pixel for a color image) are considered Low Dynamic Range.
They can store around 5 stops of light and each pixel carry a value from 0 (black) to 255 (white).
As a comparison, DSLR cameras can capture ~12-15 stops of light and they use RAW files to store the information.

 

https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/dynamic-range.htm

 

https://www.hdrsoft.com/resources/dri.html#bit-depth

 

Note that the number of bits itself may be a misleading indication of the real dynamic range that the image reproduces — converting a Low Dynamic Range image to a higher bit depth does not change its dynamic range, of course.

• 8-bit images (i.e. 24 bits per pixel for a color image) are considered Low Dynamic Range.
• 16-bit images (i.e. 48 bits per pixel for a color image) resulting from RAW conversion are still considered Low Dynamic Range, even though the range of values they can encode is significantly higher than for 8-bit images (65536 versus 256). Note that converting a RAW file involves applying a tonal curve that compresses the dynamic range of the RAW data so that the converted image shows correctly on low dynamic range monitors. The need to adapt the output image file to the dynamic range of the display is the factor that dictates how much the dynamic range is compressed, not the output bit-depth. By using 16 instead of 8 bits, you will gain precision but you will not gain dynamic range.
• 32-bit images (i.e. 96 bits per pixel for a color image) are considered High Dynamic Range.Unlike 8- and 16-bit images which can take a finite number of values, 32-bit images are coded using floating point numbers, which means the values they can take is unlimited.It is important to note, though, that storing an image in a 32-bit HDR format is a necessary condition for an HDR image but not a sufficient one. When an image comes from a single capture with a standard camera, it will remain a Low Dynamic Range image,

 

 

Also note that bit depth and dynamic range are often confused as one, but are indeed separate concepts and there is no direct one to one relationship between them. Bit depth is about capacity, dynamic range is about the actual ratio of data stored.
The bit depth of a capturing or displaying device gives you an indication of its dynamic range capacity. That is, the highest dynamic range that the device would be capable of reproducing if all other constraints are eliminated.

 

https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Bit_Depth

 

Finally, note that there are two ways to “count” bits for an image — either the number of bits per color channel (BPC) or the number of bits per pixel (BPP). A bit (0,1) is the smallest unit of data stored in a computer.

For a grayscale image, 8-bit means that each pixel can be one of 256 levels of gray (256 is 2 to the power 8).

For an RGB color image, 8-bit means that each one of the three color channels can be one of 256 levels of color.
Since each pixel is represented by 3 colors in this case, 8-bit per color channel actually means 24-bit per pixel.

Similarly, 16-bit for an RGB image means 65,536 levels per color channel and 48-bit per pixel.

To complicate matters, when an image is classified as 16-bit, it just means that it can store a maximum 65,535 values. It does not necessarily mean that it actually spans that range. If the camera sensors can not capture more than 12 bits of tonal values, the actual bit depth of the image will be at best 12-bit and probably less because of noise.

The following table attempts to summarize the above for the case of an RGB color image.

 

 

Type of digital support	Bit depth per color channel	Bit depth per pixel	FStops	Theoretical maximum Dynamic Range	Reality
8-bit	8	24	8	256:1	most consumer images
12-bit CCD	12	36	12	4,096:1	real maximum limited by noise
14-bit CCD	14	42	14	16,384:1	real maximum limited by noise
16-bit TIFF (integer)	16	48	16	65,536:1	bit-depth in this case is not directly related to the dynamic range captured
16-bit float EXR	16	48	30	65,536:1	values are distributed more closely in the (lower) darker tones than in the (higher) lighter ones, thus allowing for a more accurate description of the tones more significant to humans. The range of normalized 16-bit floats can represent thirty stops of information with 1024 steps per stop. We have eighteen and a half stops over middle gray, and eleven and a half below. The denormalized numbers provide an additional ten stops with decreasing precision per stop. http://download.nvidia.com/developer/GPU_Gems/CD_Image/Image_Processing/OpenEXR/OpenEXR-1.0.6/doc/#recs
HDR image (e.g. Radiance format)	32	96	“infinite”	4.3 billion:1	real maximum limited by the captured dynamic range

32-bit floats are often called “single-precision” floats, and 64-bit floats are often called “double-precision” floats. 16-bit floats therefore are called “half-precision” floats, or just “half floats”.

 

https://petapixel.com/2018/09/19/8-12-14-vs-16-bit-depth-what-do-you-really-need

On a separate note, even Photoshop does not handle 16bit per channel. Photoshop does actually use 16-bits per channel. However, it treats the 16th digit differently – it is simply added to the value created from the first 15-digits. This is sometimes called 15+1 bits. This means that instead of 216 possible values (which would be 65,536 possible values) there are only 215+1 possible values (which is 32,768 +1 = 32,769 possible values).

 

Rec-601 (for the older SDTV format, very similar to rec-709) and Rec-709 (the HDTV’s recommended set of color standards, at times also referred to sRGB, although not exactly the same) are currently the most spread color formats and hardware configurations in the world.

 

Following those you can find the larger P3 gamut, more commonly used in theaters and in digital production houses (with small variations and improvements to color coverage), as well as most of best 4K/WCG TVs.

 

And a new standard is now promoted against P3, referred to Rec-2020 and UHDTV.

 

It is still debatable if this is going to be adopted at consumer level beyond the P3, mainly due to lack of hardware supporting it. But initial tests do prove that it would be a future proof investment.

www.colour-science.org/anders-langlands/

 

Rec. 2020 is ultimately designed for television, and not cinema. Therefore, it is to be expected that its properties must behave according to current signal processing standards. In this respect, its foundation is based on current HD and SD video signal characteristics.

 

As far as color bit depth is concerned, it allows for a maximum of 12 bits, which is more than enough for humans.

Comparing standards, REC-709 covers 35.9% of the human visible spectrum. P3 45.5%. And REC-2020 75.8%.
https://www.avsforum.com/forum/166-lcd-flat-panel-displays/2812161-what-color-volume.html

 

Comparing coverage to hardware devices

 

To note that all the new standards generally score very high on the Pointer’s Gamut chart. But with REC-2020 scoring 99.9% vs P3 at 88.2%.
www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/pointers_gamut.htm

https://www.slideshare.net/hpduiker/acescg-a-common-color-encoding-for-visual-effects-applications

 

The Pointer’s gamut is (an approximation of) the gamut of real surface colors as can be seen by the human eye, based on the research by Michael R. Pointer (1980). What this means is that every color that can be reflected by the surface of an object of any material is inside the Pointer’s gamut. Basically establishing a widely respected target for color reproduction. Visually, Pointers Gamut represents the colors we see about us in the natural world. Colors outside Pointers Gamut include those that do not occur naturally, such as neon lights and computer-generated colors possible in animation. Which would partially be accounted for with the new gamuts.

cinepedia.com/picture/color-gamut/

 

Not all current TVs can support the full spread of the new gamuts. Here is a list of modern TVs’ color coverage in percentage:
www.rtings.com/tv/tests/picture-quality/wide-color-gamut-rec-709-dci-p3-rec-2020

 

There are no TVs that can come close to displaying all the colors within Rec.2020, and there likely won’t be for at least a few years. However, to help future-proof the technology, Rec.2020 support is already baked into the HDR spec. That means that the same genuine HDR media that fills the DCI P3 space on a compatible TV now, will in a few years also fill Rec.2020 on a TV supporting that larger space.

 

Rec.2020’s main gains are in the number of new tones of green that it will display, though it also offers improvements to the number of blue and red colors as well. Altogether, Rec.2020 will cover about 75% of the visual spectrum, which is a sizeable increase in coverage even over DCI P3.

 

 

Dolby Vision

https://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/what-is-dolby-vision/39049

https://www.techhive.com/article/3237232/dolby-vision-vs-hdr10-which-is-best.html

 

Dolby Vision is a proprietary end-to-end High Dynamic Range (HDR) format that covers content creation and playback through select cinemas, Ultra HD displays, and 4K titles. Like other HDR standards, the process uses expanded brightness to improve contrast between dark and light aspects of an image, bringing out deeper black levels and more realistic details in specular highlights — like the sun reflecting off of an ocean — in specially graded Dolby Vision material.

 

The iPhone 12 Pro gets the ability to record 4K 10-bit HDR video. According to Apple, it is the very first smartphone that is capable of capturing Dolby Vision HDR.

The iPhone 12 Pro takes two separate exposures and runs them through Apple’s custom image signal processor to create a histogram, which is a graph of the tonal values in each frame. The Dolby Vision metadata is then generated based on that histogram. In Laymen’s terms, it is essentially doing real-time grading while you are shooting. This is only possible due to the A14 Bionic chip.

 

Dolby Vision also allows for 12-bit color, as opposed to HDR10’s and HDR10+’s 10-bit color. While no retail TV we’re aware of supports 12-bit color, Dolby claims it can be down-sampled in such a way as to render 10-bit color more accurately.

 

 

 

 

 

Resources for more reading:

https://www.avsforum.com/forum/166-lcd-flat-panel-displays/2812161-what-color-volume.html

 

wolfcrow.com/say-hello-to-rec-2020-the-color-space-of-the-future/

 

www.cnet.com/news/ultra-hd-tv-color-part-ii-the-future/