Digital Light & Color

I have traditionally used Nikon's proprietary software for it's raw files, an aftermarket image sharpening program, then used PWP on the resulting 16 bit/channel file in an attempt to get the best quality image.

However, I recently read some comments from a photographer who praised the benefits of opening a raw image from Photoshop Camera Raw into Photoshop as a 32 bit Smart Object, to get the most quality from the file. He seemed quite excited about this practice and even suggested that this will be the future of image editing (only his opinion, of course). This photographer (Mark Metternich) is quite OCD in his endeavours to get the most quality from an image, at every step of the process, from raw to print.

So, I'm wondering, does anyone have an opinion on the benefits of "32 bit" and "Smart Objects", is 32 bit relevant to PWP 8 and will version 8 have a similar workflow to obtain this "untapped" potential?

Marv

PWP 8 does not do RAW file conversion, so you need to run your RAW files through some other program such as DxO Optics (my personal favorite), Lightroom, Adobe Capture Raw, Capture One, Raw Therapee, etc. and export them as TIFF (preferably 16-bit TIFF) before you can edit them in PWP 8.

Since the eye can distinguish under even ideal conditions less than 256 different gray levels, and even allowing for having to gamma correct images, there is no reason in my opinion why 16 bit (65536 gray levels) images are insufficient for any normal type of photo processing, with the possible exception of extreme HDR. Even in this case, the extra bits are only used temporarily within the HDR merging software and the result is then compressed back to 16 bits or 8 bits.

Smart Objects are just a way of doing non-destructive editing and do not affect the actual image processing. PWP 8 is inherently non-destructive by design.

Thanks for the information Jonathan.

Hi Jonathan,

If RAW files will not be processed by PWP8 can I assume that DNG files will not be either....therefore TIFF files will be the best "vehicle" to work with?

Looking forward to PWP8 !!!

Mahn

Yes, that is correct.