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View Full Version : Question about PSE message 16 bit vs 8 bit


Soupy
February 3rd, 2007, 08:58 AM
Hi,
I am a novice at Photoshop Elements 5 and forums, so I would appreciate any help. I am trying to scan old black and white pictures. My settings are set to 300 dpi and millions of colors and I am saving them as tiff files. When I try to work on them in the PS Editor, I receive this message: "Could not perform the requested action because PSE provides only limited support for files with 16 bit color depth. Do you want to covert the image to 8bit?" Choices are to covert depth or cancel. I read where you just select "color" even though the pictures are b&w. Am I selecting the wrong settings for the scans? If I choose convert depth, am I losing important data? Should I be scanning at 600 for the really small pictures?
Soupy

Wendy
February 3rd, 2007, 09:32 AM
Hi ...

... and welcome to the forum :)

As far as scanning resolution is not easy to give a hard and fast rule but this is generally what I do. Old "snaps" I tend to scan in at 300 ... but studio photographs or more professional ones I use 600. I always scan in colour and make adjustment in Elements ... as I think its more flexible to do it that way.

Sounds like you are scanning in at 16 bit ... I usual scan in a 8 bit. I doubt that you would lose anything by doing the same thing :)

Wendy