Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Martin Wesley" <
mwesley250@e...> wrote:

> You are right but what about all the people who work entirely in 16-bit
> mode? Or like myself stay in 16-bit as long as possible before going to
> 8-bit? On a couple of negs I have been forced to stay in 16-bit to get the
> tonality I want. Adobe is really missing the need for full functionality in
> 16-bit for critical B&W work. 

What functionality is missing? You have all the tools (levels, curves, Hue/Sat, 
resize, conversions, spotting etc) in high bit be it grayscale or color. 

Adjustment layers would be nice. More History support would be nice But you 
can still do all the work that high bit benifits in imaging, change your mind and 
go back without hosing the data unless you go insane with edits. I'd love to 
see high bit adjustment layers just for the ability to keep track of edits and 
change my mind. But that wouldn't produce better quality data once you dump 
the high bit down to 8 bits. 

And of printing direclty out of Photoshop, you don't have to dump to 8 bits 
(Photoshop does this on the fly as you print). With the exception of one or two 
very high end RGB output devices, I don't know of any that would even accept 
high bit files if you feed them this data. So high bit is good for doing editing so 
that you end up with the best 8 bits to output. 

I do want to see more high bit functionality but today, I can do all the 
necessary work that high bit provides advantags for (namely tonal and color 
corrections).