One of the best articles on bit depth etc.

[Eric Rose]

Very exhaustive analysis on bit depth, gamma and all those other 1's and 0's that drive you nuts.

https://petapixel.com/2018/09/19/8-12-14-vs-16-bit-depth-what-do-you-really-need/

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I use Lightroom which is 16 bits and PS Elements which is 8 bits. I process mainly color.

Should I care about Element's 8 bit limit?

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

You can have all the bits your heart desires in colour, but once you get down to the printer it will be good old 8 bits, to which I have been outputting since Nelson lost an eye...

 

[wiltw]

I use Lightroom which is 16 bits and PS Elements which is 8 bits. I process mainly color.

Should I care about Element's 8 bit limit?

Long ago I found that Paintshop Pro was not as good as Lightroom for exposure 'recovery'. The article linked in OP fundamentally states that it is when you 'push' a severely underexposed shot that the difference between 8 bit image and 12-14 bit image will manifest itself in the shadows. So if you do a good job of exposure, and never screw up really badly, you probably would never notice any advantage of working in more than 8-bit space.

 

[jim10219]

You can have all the bits your heart desires in colour, but once you get down to the printer it will be good old 8 bits, to which I have been outputting since Nelson lost an eye...

That depends on your printer. Many printers these days are capable of 12, 14, and 16 bit printing. Some will require a RIP program to take full advantage of it. If you choose to print straight from your image editing software, you may experience issues with your ICC profiles not rendering colors correctly. How large the difference in output between various bit depths will depend on a lot of factors. So it’s still not the best option in all circumstances, but can be in some.

But I would worry less about bit depths than composition. By orders of magnitude, more photos are ruined by bad composition than lack of bit depth.

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

But I would worry less about bit depths than composition. By orders of magnitude, more photos are ruined by bad composition than lack of bit depth.

Absolutely true!

The print machinery I use was an old (now decommissioned -- parts not available and chemicals in short supply) Kodak Pegasus for wet RA-4 and latterly a flash-bang-whollop Epson...something, all 3.8m long. ICC profiling (ex Heidelberg drum) is 8-bit ColourMatch and is providing beautiful, wide gamut prints that are very faithful to the original (RVP/RDPIII) transparency.

 

[nmp]

Importance of 16 bit goes up with the amount of post-processing of the image. More layers mean the error due to truncation will multiply (banding being one of the typical outcomes.) So if one is doing bare minimum changes after image capture and does not need to recover details in the shadows, may be 8 bit will suffice. Otherwise I would do most of my processing in Lightroom supplanted with in PS Elements when necessary, if those were my only options.

Once all the changes are done, flattening and converting to 8 bit would have very little perceptive change from the 16 bit post-processed image. Printers print at 8 bits, as far as I know. However, there is data manipulation done after sending the file and before the nozzles fire up (dpi, printer profile conversions, RGB to CMYK etc) for which sending a 16 bit file may be beneficial, if the printer drivers can take it, as opposed to 8 bit. Probably not by much though.

:Niranjan .

P.S. Very nice article.....thanks for sharing, Eric.