Comment by ibigb

What you have described is usually called a 24 bit rgb image--not a 8 bit image. An 8 bit image can have only 256 distinct levels, whereas a jpeg can have ~16 million or 2^24 values for each pixel. 8 bit images are used often for medical imaging, but they are crude compared to 24 bit rgb images. One can argue that 24 bit rgb images are too crude, but they should not, IMHO, be called 8 bit images. But that is often what people say about jpegs. Typical jpegs with 8 bit coefficients have much more information than 8 bit images. Perhaps typical imprecise terminology? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth#True_color_(24-bit... [2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-colors-does-a-JPEG-contain [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#JPEG_codec_example << They walk thru the steps.