RichardC

Hi all...I tried several scans of an under exposed B&W neg and the 16 bit version was the best and the printer cooperated fine. [stuned] It appeared that there was not enough shades of gray to blend smoothly otherwise so there was white ?blotches? on the others. The ?fix? may have been caused by another inadvertent tweaking though......I?m not sure. I was mistaken in my original post in that my scanner gives me a 14 bit option (not 16) but PS recognizes it as 16 bits. Can anyone shed any light on that?[doh] ......RC

BabbleGrabble

Hi RichardC, we were just talking in another thread. [honesty]

I'm not sure if I'm interpreting the question correctly, so I apologize if my answer is meaningless. [confused]

It would be best to utilize the full 14 bits in the scan process to grab all the data you can. Photoshop will put any scan greater than 8 bits into the 16-bit-per-channel space, which allows for less data loss during editing even though you don't have access to all of the tools.

I hope that made some sense.

RichardC

Yes, that makes sense BG...I'm just confused about the fact that everyone and everything talks about 8 vs 16 bits and then my scanner blurts out "14". [doh] I have an 8 or 14 bit per channel scanning option rather than 8 or 16.[confused] Not knowing much about it I assumed that "16" was some kind of standard. No cause for alarm? Thanks for your response....RC

BabbleGrabble

Right - no cause for alarm... scanners vary greatly (10-bit, 12-bit, 14-bit, etc.) I would be plenty happy with a 14-bit scan, and think of it in Photoshop as "up-to-16-bit-per-channel." Photoshop will still take full advantage of the 14.