The bit depth of an image will be determined by the camera that the image was captured on. Bit DepthĢ4-bit (also called 24-bit RGB = 3 x 8-bit channels) Note: in black and white images 'colours' in the dynamic reange refer to shades of grey between white and black.
The number of colours (also referred to as dynamic range) can be calculated by the simple equation: 2^bit-depth. The bit depth of an image essentially determines the number of colours that can be displayed within that image. We will use the images NeuralTube.jpg plus NeuralTube Blue Saturated.tif and TrichromeIHC.tif throughout this section, along with the image set ‘RGB- blue.tif, RGB-green.tif and RGB-red.tif'. This section will show you how to arrange and alter multi-channel images and change the colour of your images. Often you will want to add colour to each channel (usually in the colour of the fluorophores emission) and to create composite images of 2 or more of the channels combined. This means that each fluorophore is captured as a different image with no associated colour. Immunofluorescence experiments are almost always captured on highly sensitive monochrome cameras.