Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Martin Wesley" 

< Layers and Channels. Without layers and alpha channel masking 
Photoshop is seriously crippled in 16-bit mode in my opinon. 

Layers would be nice. But if you are past the point of doing corrections and it's 
time for creative stuff, then you *could* downsample to 8 bits and go at it. The 
benifits of high bit (doing those tonal and color corrections that would lose 
data) have been taken care of. But yes, give the choices, I'd love to composite 
in 16 bit. 

As for channels, you can still do a lot in 16 bit on an 8 bit copy. You can load 
any of the channels from the 8 bit file to the 16 bit file as long as both files 
have the identical pixel count. So I dupliate the 16 bit file, drop it down to 8 bit, 
make my channles and move the over to the 16 bit file. Again, if I could do this 
without the extra work, it would be nice. 

>You are also missing a lot tools as well,
> Sharpen, Blur and Smudge Tool, Dodge, Burn and Saturate Tool, Eraser,
> Paintbrush, Magic Wand Tool, Color Range Select, etc.

Well Gaussian Blue and USM are 16 bit filters. 

> You can make due but life would be simpler if you had the choice to stay in
> high bit mode. This would be the biggest upgrade Adobe could make to PS. 

Well keep telling them this and you might see it someday. I know I (and 
people I hang with like Jeff Schewe) keep telling them that. Nothing would 
make me happier to see far more high bit support in the next version. 
I'm not sure how many copies that would sell but there is a hard core group of 
PS users that have been asking for this for a long time.