Why 8-Bit Mobile Editing Is Dead

Modern smartphones capture dynamic range and colour depth that rival dedicated cinema cameras. Apple Log, 10-bit HDR, Display P3. The hardware has moved on.

The software hasn’t.

Most mobile editing apps were built on legacy architectures. The moment you import 10-bit Apple Log footage, it’s silently transcoded to 8-bit. Your colours are crushed, your skies start banding, and your highlight data is gone before you touch a slider.

We decided to fix that.

The 8-Bit Problem

An 8-bit image can display 256 shades per channel, roughly 16.7 million colours. That sounds sufficient until you start pushing exposure, recovering shadows, or applying heavy cinematic LUTs. The maths breaks down quickly.

Gradients in skies become stepped. Skin tones lose their natural transitions. Shadow detail turns to noise. Every adjustment compounds the damage because you’re working with data that’s already been truncated.

The Robin Imaging Engine

We built the Robin Imaging Engine from scratch on Apple Metal 3 and 4. Every adjustment operates in 16-bit floating-point (rgba16Float). No truncation anywhere in the chain.

Zero clipping between filters. In a standard app, lowering exposure and then boosting highlights later in the chain permanently destroys that data. In our 16-bit pipeline, intermediate values are preserved across all 25+ GPU filters. You can push and pull without ever losing information.

Dual colour space processing. Exposure adjustments are calculated in linear light. Contrast and tonal shifts happen in log space. This produces a natural, film-like response with clean shadows and smooth highlight rolloff.

Perceptual accuracy. Vibrance and colour operations use the OKLab perceptual colour space, ensuring that boosting a colour’s intensity doesn’t unnaturally shift its luminance.

What You Shoot Is What You Export

A powerful internal pipeline means nothing if the export throws it away.

When you export from DeluxeFX, the Robin Engine encodes your video in 10-bit H.265 (Main10 profile) within Display P3 wide gamut. Over a billion colours, 25% more than standard sRGB. Your cinematic grades look exactly the way you intended, whether viewed on a phone, a desktop monitor, or uploaded to social media.

Stop Losing Your Colours

Your phone captures incredible footage. Your editing app should respect that.

Download DeluxeFX and see the difference a proper colour pipeline makes.