16bit images... worth maintaining right to the end?

[narikin]

I love having the Canon plug-in and 16 bit profiles. I use Bill Atkinson's 1728 patch target for generating my profiles. But unless there is a gradation like a big sky, it's hard to see the advantage in most pictures.

just out of interest what do you generate your profiles on/with Rob?  (which spectro + which program).  thanks

[Schewe]

Are there any Epson printers which have XPS drivers to support 16-bit output under Windows 7?

Not to my knowledge...and Photoshop CS5 doesn't support output to XPS either (as far as I know).

But that's really less of an issue. The issue is to make sure you let Photoshop do the final color transform from working space to output profile in 16 bit, not 8 bit. If you do that, there really is very, very little difference between a print pipeline that ends at 8 bit at the printer and a printer accepting the full 16 bit and using it. I've tried real hard to see the difference between outputting the full 16 bit at the print head (Epson 9900 on Mac) and not. As long as you are using Photoshop to handle the colors and you're in 16 bit to finish, I think that's as good as it gets.

[Rob Reiter]

I use the iOne with the iO table and ProfileMaker 5. I usually generate both a Colorful and Chroma variant of the profile but typically use the Colorful variant for most work.

[Bill Koenig]

Does it really matter if I send a 16 bit file to my Epson 3800 from CS5, or should it first be converted to 8 bit? Doesn't the 16 bit file get converted to 8 bit anyway? I don't see any difference if I send it a 16 bit vs 8, it just saves me the extra step of converting to 8 bit before printing.

PC Win7 64

[John R Smith]

Does it really matter if I send a 16 bit file to my Epson 3800 from CS5, or should it first be converted to 8 bit? Doesn't the 16 bit file get converted to 8 bit anyway? I don't see any difference if I send it a 16 bit vs 8, it just saves me the extra step of converting to 8 bit before printing.

Bill

There is absolutely no need for you to convert 16 bit files to 8 bit before printing. As you say, the printer does that for you. Do all your editing in 16 bit, then just send it to the printer.

John