I'm feeling RAW

[awm03]

Number 2...

[awm03]

...And Number 3. Do any of these strike you as being significantly better or worse?

[MarkZ]

The problem with that, from my experience, is that PSP converts your 16-bit TIF into 8-bit. Please see Comment 2d in my post of Sat Mar 29, 2014 6:25 pm EET to show how I came to that conclusion. You can repeat the MO of my experiments to prove it for yourself.

I didn't go back to your comment 2d - may do so later. But I opened both a RAW file and a 16 bit TIFF in edit. Did some minor editing in the TIFF, cropped as new image and saved that as an uncompressed TIFF. The result was still 16 bit. This shows up as a bit depth of 48 in the information in Manage mode, and in edit properties as RGB - 16 bits/channel.

[MarkZ]

1-PSP, 2-LR, 3-ASP ??

As you say, difficult to see differences. I've found that with some images there is little difference, in others, quite a bit. For me it seems to depend on the textures and light dynamics.

[cydevil]

If you still have PSP installed could I get you to download and test the images yourself?

http://www.brucelindbloom.com/index.htm ... mages.html

Let us know if PSP also converts these to 8-bit for you? Or would you be willing to provide us with a test 16-bit image that you know was converted to 8-bit by PSP when imported?

Now I'm understanding PSP less and less! As requested, I un-zipped the first file and took it into PSP. It showed the warning (1).

(1)

On clicking OK, the file loaded and it was 16-bit

(2)

Note it has said it has been modified.

Puzzled, I then converted two NEF files, straight from the camera and converted them directly to uncompressed 16-bit TIF using ViewNX 2. With the first into PSP, it went through the same process as above and came out as 16-bit. With the second, it missed out the warning and was loaded as 8-bit! Even more puzzled, the first was an image of crystal glasses on an essentially black background, the only colour being odd spots where the light was refracted. The other was a bouquet which was a blaze of colour and detail. As a double-check, I loaded the same file into Sagelight (3) with the file properties showing clearly that the colour depth was 48-bit, ie RGB 16-bit. I included a bit of the image showing the colour range and 'fussiness'.

(3)

Now why does PSP accept some but not all 16-bit TIFs but not others? The original RAW conversions were done the same way. I had a look at the Wiki file and some other docs, but I understood little. Any thought I have would be pure speculation.

[larrewl]

View NX2 saves TIFFs as 8-bit not 16-bit depth. Recommend you try the new (beta) NX-D software to convert NEF files to 16-bit TIFFS for PSP PP. IMO, it does the best NEF -> TIFF conversion

[larrewl]

View NX2 saves TIFFs as 8-bit not 16-bit depth. Recommend you try the new (beta) NX-D software to convert NEF files to 16-bit TIFFS for PSP PP.

[awm03]

In my comparisons, #1 is PSP, #2 is ASP, #3 is LR. Still playing with different RAW converters, and I must say so far PSP gets skin tones the best. The caveat here is I'm far from an expert at using imaging software.

[cydevil]

View NX2 saves TIFFs as 8-bit not 16-bit depth. Recommend you try the new (beta) NX-D software to convert NEF files to 16-bit TIFFS for PSP PP.

Sorry, but my ViewNX2 saves NEF/RAW file TIFFs as 16-bit/ch (it allows you to choose between 8- and 16-bit!)

[Barbelfisher]

Yes my copy also gives the choice to save in 16 or 8 bit Tifs...