You've lost me completely. I don't understand the "math of photography." Just snap the shutter and see what comes out. Push a few buttons in Photoshop, or adjust the light in the darkroom. If it works one way or not another, then the answer is clear.
Anyway, I don't even understand terms like "quantization," or what a "chunkier quantization" might be, or why or how you'd amplify a quantization.. I love how photography has become a numbers crunching exercise for some people. Pick up the camera, focus, press the shutter, and see what happens, see what you get. Shel > [Original Message] > From: Gonz > This does not make sense to me. Assuming a perfect amplification and a > perfect digitization for a moment, then a shot that would have a > complete dynamic range at ISO 1600 would only go up to 1/4 the dynamic > range at ISO 400. So when you amplify this quantization (for 12 bits > this would be 2^12/4 = 1024) to the full range, you have "chunkier" > quantitization, as if you only had a 10bit sensor instead of 12. That > leads me to believe that there would be more noise associated with this. > > This is similar to the arguments of keeping your image in 16 bit mode > when editing as much as possible, until the final conversion to JPG and > 8 bits. Converting to 8 bits first then editing is going to cost you > alot of information. > > I'm not taking into account the effects of Bayer interpolation or other > interpolation such as uprezing, etc. That just complicates the way the > information is interpreted, but it does not change the absolute > underlying numbers.
