Paint Shop Pro :: Dropper Tool And Values For RGB And TIFF

Was explaining to a friend about shades of color -- human eye has Red, Green and Blue sensitive cones and each can detect about 100 shades giving a combined total of about 1 million shades that we can normally distinguish, well within the 16 million shades that a jpeg can show (256 x 256 x 256) or the 64,000,000,000 shades (4096 x 4096 x 4096) that a TIF can show.

I used the eyedropper on a JPEG to show how the values went from 0 to 255 for each of Red Green and Blue, but when I went to a TIF expecting the RGB components to go from 0 to 4096 it showed 0 to 65535. To me this is an inaccuracy in the eyedropper tool at least for Tifs

I was trying to emphasize that while we may think that by having a greater range of shades available in the TIF we can produce richer images with more variety of images it all boils down to the lowest common denominator - that our eyes are not capable of determining a range of shades more than 1 million.

Try this test -- set your foreground color to RGB 128,128,128 grey and using the paintbrush tool draw a line. Then double click on the foreground box in the materials palette and change say the red value to 129 and draw another line overlapping the first one. Repeat increasing the red value and see when the difference in shading becomes obvious to your eyes. For me I had to go from 128 to 135 before I could recognize a difference so that is 7 values which look the same to me. So I cannot see even the 16 million colors of a lowly jpg let alone the small differences in a Tif.