Digital BW, The Print

Bob,

Thanks for passing on that information. That ,coupled with Truman's earlier
remarks about PS basically being an 8-bit program with some 16-bit
functionality tacked on, rings true. Someone else mentioned to me once that
giving full 16-bit capability to PS would involve a total rewrite of the
program's core.

What is really disturbing is that Adobe's PS team seems to contain little
ability to make changes on the core level and can only add new bells and
whistles. Not that some of the things in PS7 aren't nice. The healing brush
is great, nice to have larger brush sizes and file handling but I see these
as pretty trivial. Seems like they can only do so much of this before the
upgrades become thinner and thinner.

The other major problem with PS is memory handling. It does not work well
with Window's memory management and does not efficiently handle memory with
very large files. I suspect this is also an issue that can only be resolved
at the core level of the software.

Unfortunately they have no serious competition but sooner or later I suspect
that age core software will have to be redone.

Martin Wesley

http://www.borderless-photos.de/guests.html



----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Frost" <bobfrost@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 13, 2002 5:58 AM
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Re: 'combed' histograms in 16 bit ?


> 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.
>
>
>
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