Benefits Of Working With 16-Bit Images In Photoshop

Editing Photos In 16-Bit Mode

Let's try the same editing experiment on a full color photo. I'll use the photo of the beach ball that we saw on the first page. Here's the image in standard 8-bit mode. Again we can see the "8" at the top of the Document Window:

And here's the exact same photo but in 16-bit mode:

Both images look identical at this point, just as the two gradients did.

The only difference between them is that the top one is an 8-bit image and the bottom is a 16-bit image. Let's try the exact same edit with the Levels adjustment. Now, I realize this edit is a bit extreme and isn't likely to be something you'd actually do to your images. But it does give us a clear example of how much damage we can do to our images when editing 8-bit versions of them compared with how little, if any, damage we do with 16-bit versions.

I'm going to press Ctrl+L (Win) / Command+L (Mac) once again to bring up Photoshop's Levels adjustment dialog box, and I'm going to move the black and white "Output" sliders at the bottom in towards the center, to the same points I used for the gradients. Again, I'm doing this for both the 8-bit and 16-bit versions of the image:

Here's how the 8-bit version of the image looks after forcing its entire tonal range into a small space where you'd normally find just the mid-tone information:

And here's how the 16-bit version of the image looks:

Once again, the two versions are identical. There's no visible advantage with the 16-bit version over the 8-bit version.

Now let's bring up Levels again and stretch the tonal information back to the way it was originally, with the darkest areas becoming pure black and the lightest areas becoming pure white:

Now let's see if there's any advantage with the 16-bit version over the 8-bit version. First, the 8-bit version:

Yikes! Just as with the gradient, the 8-bit version of the image suffered quite a lot of damage thanks to the edit. There is very noticeable color banding, especially in the water, which now looks more like some sort of painting effect than a full color photo. You can also see banding in the beach ball itself, and in the sand at the bottom of the photo. At this point, the 8-bit image is of little use to us anymore.

Let's see how the 16-bit version did:

Once again, just as with the gradient, the 16-bit version survived without a scratch! It looks every bit as good as it did before the edit, while the 8-bit version lost a ton of detail. And it's all because the 16-bit version has such a tremendous amount of possible colors available at its disposal. Even after an edit as drastic as the one I performed, I was unable to make the slightest dent in the quality of the image thanks to it being in 16-bit mode.

So how can you take advantage of 16-bit with your own photos? Simple. Shoot your photos in the raw format instead of JPEG whenever possible (assuming of course that your camera supports raw), then open and edit them in Photoshop as 16-bit images. Keep in mind though that when working with 16-bit images, the file size is much larger than you'd have with an 8-bit image, and if you have an older computer, it could have an impact on how long it takes you to work in Photoshop. Also, although each new version of Photoshop gets better and better with this, not every filter and adjustment is available to us in 16-bit mode, but most of the commonly used ones are. If you find that you do need to switch to 8-bit at some point because your computer is running too slow or the filter you want to use is unavailable, you can switch to 8-bit mode by going up to the Image menu at the top of the screen, choosing Mode, and then choosing 8 Bits/Channel. Try to work in 16-bit mode for as long as possible though before switching to 8-bit mode. Also, make sure you switch to 8-bit mode before printing the image, or even better, save your 16-bit version as a Photoshop .PSD file and then save a separate 8-bit version for printing.

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