Does Higher Resolution Specifically/Technically Benefit Color Grading?

[Desmond Ford]

I'm trying to figure out specifically/technically how higher resolution alone benefits color grading... does it allow us to push colors further than lower resolution media, all other factors being equal? Yes, I understand the many other benefits of 5K in VFX such as cropping, composting, etc; but color is a whole other beast...

For example, Red Epic, I shoot a few takes at 5K and then down res to 2K. Same scene, same camera, same lighting, etc...

I ask because it would seem to me that having more pixels to manipulate is almost like more bit-depth in the sense that more tonal values give you smoother gradients. So it stands to reason that more resolution would benefit the image in the same way: it'd allow for a smoother transition/fall off from one tonal value within a pixel to the next pixel becasue there would be so many more that it'd look better to the human eye...

Then again, when I think about it, it's almost just like having more pixels, is just more of the same, so maybe there reallly isn't any benefit for color specifically.

To be more general, what impact does resolution have on color grading?



dezzy

 

[Les Dittert]

Yes, more pixels with the natural noise that goes with them does effectively increase bit depth.
I have used this principal to encode higher than 8 bit bit depth in an image into an 8 bit container by using diffusion dither and increasing resolution of the image.