setting up photoshop for 16bit?

[PASM]

Just to mention too..JPEGs are 24bit color (8 bits per channel)

Also, its worth mentioning, that many filters will be unavailable in 16bit mode depending on your version.

 

[cidrmakr]

Keep in mind that 99% of monitors can ONLY show srgb. Whether you have adobe98 or prophoto or lab as the color mode, what you see is srgb. If you soft proof properly with the final you can see differences in out of gamut between the various color spaces but you have to be set up to soft proof properly. Also keep in mind that what you are seeing is the composite of three channels (open channels and look at it in ps). When you convert color spaces the software simply changes the values of black and white in each of the three channels. Same when you go from 16 bit to 8 bit. The numbers just get crunched. Problem is that once crunched there will be blank spaces if you try to go back, so you cannot go back. Try to go from 8 bit to 16 and ps will do it by creating / guessing numbers to fill in the holes. Same with srgb to adobe98 or adobe98 to prophoto. ps just guesses where to fill in. When done with a print it will be saved as a jpg, in 8 bit, and sent to a printer in the color mode they want - either adobe98 or srgb. The only reason for going thru all the hassle of 16 bit and converting color modes is to reduce or eliminate damage to the image that shows up as banding, artifacts, outlines, and lots of other not so good things - if an only if you are printing 16x20, 24x30 or bigger as I do (my prints will be at ArtExpo, NY). If you are only making 8x10's it don't matter one way or the other and you will never see a difference between 8 or 16 or color modes. Especially if you are not into heavy modification of the image.

 

[Garbz]

Try to go from 8 bit to 16 and ps will do it by creating / guessing numbers to fill in the holes. Same with srgb to adobe98 or adobe98 to prophoto. ps just guesses where to fill in.

This part is a bit wrong. There's no creating or guessing going on. It's a straight conversion. There will be holes. If you have pixels with the values 0, 1, 2, 3 then they would take the values as 0, 256, 512, 768, 1024 respectively.


That said and slightly off topic, there's still a benefit of converting an 8bit image to 16bit for the purposes of editing. This is because photoshop will work with layers in the order they are presented, in the bitdepth that it's set at. So if you have an 8bit image, and you apply a curve to make it look very dark, and then another curve to bring it back to light you'll get much worse banding if you're in 8bit, than 16bit, even if the original image opened only contained 8bits of data.

 

[Trbo323]

thanks for all the info guys, it really helps, while right now most of my stuff is displayed in a digital format as my schooling goes on more and more will be printed. the bad news is the photo department here still uses CS4 and wont upgrade untill CS6 comes out. I have CS4 on my system and have been debating going to CS5 since i can get it for $150 but im not sure if there will be any issues when learning one thing in class on CS4 then coming to my computer and trying to do it in CS5

thoughts on that?

 

[Garbz]

My suggestion is stick with CS4. It's quite capable, and everytime Adobe releases a new version of Photoshop they depreciate support for older versions of Adobe CameraRAW. Meaning if you buy CS5 now, and CS6 comes out, and you THEN buy a new camera you may not be able to process RAWs and have to shell out yet again for a forced upgrade or jump through hoops to get your RAW files in.

Ultimately though there are a few cool features on CS5. Content Aware Fill, Focus Stacking, GPU acceleration that may make it worth the upgrade. Depends if you think this is worth $150.