Digital BW, The Print

Martin,

Here's what Russel Williams had to say on this on the Epson-inkjet list not
so long ago:

"As for 16 bit layers, here's a revised version of an item I've posted in
the
past.

While we generally try to add 16 bit support over time, there is no crash
program (nor is one currently contemplated) to make all features work in 16
bit. The reason is not laziness. We have a fixed amount of money and time to
spend on improving Photoshop, and we have to choose how to spend it to
provide the most benefit to the most users -- and that includes attracting
new users.

That said, I realize that the number of 16 bit image sources is increasing,
and the 16 bit images from digital cameras tend to be smaller and thus more
manageable than the high resolution scans that were the previously most
common source. If your raw scan was 100-200MB, getting the big curves moves
done and then cutting the image size in half was an obvious win on its own
merits. If your digicam file is 10-20MB, cutting it in half is much less of
an issue.

The 16 bit features already in Photoshop provide most of the benefit to be
had from 16 bit mode -- once you make your large adjustments in 16 bit,
there is -- for most users most of the time -- very little reason to keep
the image in 16 bit (and keep in mind that the percentage of users who
*ever* work in 16 bit is still small to begin with). So full support for
everything in 16 bit would only help a very small number of users a small
percentage of the time. How many copies of Photoshop 6 would we have sold if
the only feature was "16 bit everything"?

Such support would be *extremely* expensive. There are hundreds of routines
that perform graphics operations in Photoshop -- thousands if you include
the plugins. Every one of them would have to be duplicated. Further, there
are already several versions of many of those routines -- Intel assembly,
PPC assembly, MMX accelerated, AltiVec accelerated, SSE accelerated. In
order for 16 bit operations to be *only* twice as slow as 8 bit operations,
many of those low level routines would have to be hand-optimized as well,
with separate versions written for different processors.

Finally, most of the people on the Photoshop team are not skilled in writing
and optimizing the low level graphics routines. Photoshop is a huge
application and the team has a wide diversity of skills. We no more have the
ability to put all our resources into 16-bitness for a single release than
we do to put them all on typography for a single release.

The question isn't "should we do 16 bit everything?", but "is it worth
giving up a long list of other more generally useful features over a long
period of time to do 16 bit everything?" Not surprisingly, the answer has
always turned out to be "no".

Russell Williams
not speaking for Adobe Systems"

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Wesley" <mwesley250@...>
>
> 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.
Of
> course this would require some real programming work on the core of PS I
> image and I have heard that PS is not one of their big money makers, so I
am
> not holding my breath. I wish Picture Window Pro had a decent user
interface
> and would move a lot of my work to there.