Opening 48 bit images

I recently purchased Photoshop Elements 2, and discovered that it will not open 48 bit colour scans for editing. All my transparencies are scanned in 48bit colour depth, but Element needs to convert it into 24 bit before opening it. I am concerned about the loss of quality, as a 80bm image becomes a 40mb. I was expecting Elements to be up to date, as many scanners now scan in 48 bit. How much loss is there when 48bit is converted to 24 bit?. Any ideas, solutions? Thanks, Rohith

Try it out and see what you think of the results. Use a copy of your image.

Rohith,

Elements will not even do 24bit color (CMYK). It's not designed to. It IS designed for RGB color. AND, it's not intended for color sep printing. It's really only intended for home/office type printing to ink jets, laser, or dye sublimation printers. The BEST color for those printers (even though they use CMYK or CCMMYK inks) is RGB. If you send a CMYK image to one of those printers, it has to first convert it to RGB and then uses it's own system for applying their ink colors to the print media.

Having said that, I'm still not convinced that 48bit color does anything for ANY print images outside of making horribly large image files. CMYK colors have a selection of over 4 billion colors. 48bit color gives you 1.125 Quad-Trillion colors (yes QUAD-TRILLION) colors. I doubt that perfect human eyesight can distinguish the difference between quad-trillion tones of color .... or see the difference between even millions vx quad-trillion colors, much less CMYK's Billions of colors.

The purist in theory sees that he's missing something by not using the maximum of the device maker's claim. I'd also like to see the spectograph analysis of inexpensive scanners doing true 48 bit color.

Bob

Histogram proves that editing in 48 bit makes a *big* diff in scientific sense.

Human eyes prove that *some* editing functions in 48 bit on *some* images provide a better final result.

48 bit imaging is quite important for some scientific image analyis purposes. Again, though, this data is perceived by machines, and not human beans.

Mac

Mac, are those the same folks that live in Bean Station?

:)

Dick

yup, dem human beans.
Some live in Boston, too!

Mac

Correction, Bahstin! :)

Mac lives in God's country, so he can be forgiven his disdain of those effete northerners <G> .

Yankees visit.
Damn Yankees stay!
:-)

Mac