Digital Imaging Impact on PCs frequently asked questions Eating a PC before Breakfast Digital Cameras FAQ Digital Photography FAQ Digital Imaging Graphics makes for big files. PCs can grunt and groan under the strain. You should read the resolution FAQ before reading this page.
Color depth is the number of colors that are supported by an image format.
The color depth is set by the number of bits used to store the color of each pixel. Click here for an example. The higher the color depth that is supported by an image format, the more space the files take up on your hard drive. With digital photography color depth and resolution are the two important facets of image quality, you would rarely reduce the number of colors in an image if you wanted to retain quality. Regardless of whether you use compressed images or not, an image is expanded to its full size in memory.