Nikon D300 User Manual page 150

lot more color—almost 4,400,000,000,000 (4.4 trillion)
shades.
Is that important? Well, it can be, since the more color
information you have available, the better the color in the
image—if it has a lot of color. I always use the
now that I have it available. That allows for smoother color
changes when a large range of color is actually in the image. I
like that!
Of course, once you save your image as a JPEG or TIFF,
most of those colors are compressed, or thrown away.
Shooting a TIFF or JPEG image in-camera (as opposed to a
RAW image) means that the D300(S) converts from a
14-bit RGB file down to an 8-bit file. An 8-bit image file can
hold 256 different colors per RGB channel—over 16,000,000
(16 million) colors.
There's a big difference between the number of colors stored
in a RAW file and the number stored in an in-camera JPEG or
TIFF. That's why I always shoot in RAW, so that later I can
make full use of all those potential extra colors to create a
different look for the same image, if I'd like.
If you shoot in RAW and later save your image in-computer
as a 16-bit TIFF file, you can store all the colors you
originally captured. The D300(S) will not create a 16-bit
TIFF; it is limited to an 8-bit TIFF. However, if you shoot
RAW, and in 14-bit, you can later save the file as a 16-bit
TIFF and not lose any color information. A 16-bit file can
contain 65,536 different colors in each of the RGB channels.
Lots of people save their files as 16-bit TIFFs when
post-processing RAW files. TIFF gives us a known and safe
150
14-bit mode,
12- or