No, a jpeg pixel is not "the summation of 64 8 bit coefficients." I've written jpeg codecs (and many other image formats). It works just as I explained above.

Or simply read the libjpeg source.

Don't like that, read this [1]: "JPEG images are always recorded with 8-bit depth. This means the files can record 256 (28) levels of red, green and blue."

Don't like that, here [2] is the JPEG ISO standard, section 4.11, baseline jpeg, "Source image: 8-bit samples within each component".

A DCT takes an 8x8 pixel input, 8 bits per channel, and transforms them into an 8x8 output. It matters not what these are - the information theory content is nothing more than what was put into it. There is not suddenly magically more information content.

More simply, appending zeroes to a number does not mean you can represent more numbers. You simply can represent the exact same numbers, just wasting more space.

None of what you wrote adds more resolution at the output. It simply isn't there.

If I give you 5 possible inputs to a function, then you have 5 possible outputs, not matter how many digits you finagle into representing the output.

Jpeg has 8 bits of resolution per channel. End of story. That is why professional photos are taken and edited in raw - you get more bits of resolution per channel.

I'm not sure why you're still arguing this. It's a longstanding, well known issue, and I explained it all again very simply.

If you think it isn't true, encode one of your magic jepgs with more than 256 levels of gray and post it here. Good luck :)

If you cannot do that, then maybe you should consider that you're wrong.

[1] https://www.photoreview.com.au/tips/editing/bit-depth/

[2] https://www.w3.org/Graphics/JPEG/itu-t81.pdf

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.

I never called them 8 bit images. I wrote 8 bits per channel. Each of RGB are channels. An RGBA image has 4 channels. A grayscale image has one channel. This is standard terminology. So an 8 bits per channel image with three channels is a 24 but image.

It is very precise terminology, used correctly. It's also covered in your links; you can read it there.

Now, if you encode gray levels in RGB, at 8 bits per channel, you do indeed end up with only 256 gray levels in the image, because for each pixel, R=G=B.

Actually the coefficients are 12 bit in JPEG, before quantization. In principle you can make pretty accurate 10-bit HDR JPEG files, and with an accurate JPEG decoder, it would work well enough.

The most common JPEG decoders though (in particular libjpeg-turbo) are using a cheap but not super precise iDCT that has 8-bit YCbCr as output, which then gets chroma-upsampled if needed and converted to 8-bit RGB. That causes the effective precision in reds and blues to be only 7-bit. But in principle you could have about 10 bits of effective RGB precision, it just requires a sufficiently precise JPEG decoder.