Remote sensing data is structured in 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit formats. There are many instances where you may want to scale data from a higher to a lower bit depth. For example, you can prepare data for visual display by scaling it from 16-bit or 32-bit to 8-bit. You can also scale data to a lower bit depth before you export it to applications that do not support data bits greater than 8-bit. By scaling, you can change 32-bit real data from a real number to a whole number and you can scale to reduce the size of your imagery. However, there is a risk of losing information when you scale to reduce file size.
With 8-bit data, the digital numbers (DN) assigned to each pixel are between zero and 255. With 16-bit data, DNs can be between zero and 65,535. Because the human eye is not sensitive to subtle differences in grayscale or color, there is no visual benefit to gain from images composed of thousands of shade variations.
Focus can also perform color and shade scaling to help you control a large range of data values. Scaling an image often makes the data easier to manage and interpret.
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