I will not mention any thoughts on the use of 8-bit vs. 16-bit for post-processing in this post here.
So, to answer your question -
PSE works only on 8 bit images. Change settings in your Lightroom preferences to convert image to 8-bit PSD or TIFF and that should be fine.
If you use full version PS - you will not have any errors, since it works with 16 bit images quite well!
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Umesh,
That's not exactly true, PSE5, and PSE4 before it, could both open 16 bit files, but with limited capabilities. You can even do some editing, Cropping, Levels, Sharpening and Resizing plus some others and then save in a few selected formats such as JPEG2000, PSD, and TIFF all in the 16bit mode. Or as Barbara Brundage says in her book;, "Photoshop Elements 5, The Missing Manual," . . . "A popular choice when you're thinking about your order of operations (workflow, in photo-industry speak) is to first convert your RAW file as a 16-bit image to take advantage of the increased color information while making any basic corrections, and then convert to 8-bit for the fancy stuff like the artistic filters or layer creation."
This is a procedure I've been following for two years or more and I've found little inconvenience in working in this manner. Or as Jeff Schewe says in the conclusion of the Lightroom Video Tutorials, (paraphrsing this time) or you could even use Elements, it's 70% of Photoshop.
I process all my RAW files to 16bit until I need something else that is not available in 16bit, then I change to the 8-bit mode, but I can crop, do levels, sharpen and print using Adobe RGB as my color space, all in 16bit. Granted, by the time you go from Lightroom to Elements, you could have done all these things and most Pixel Editing functions will require a Mode change to 8-bit, but you can continue to do such things as USM, or the Adjust Sharpness Command, or even use your Noise Ninja plug-in.
His problem is probably something else, a possibility is trying to open a file CMYK file which is not supported by PSE, but I thought the program would warn him of that. I'm not even sure Lightroom supports CMYK, I can't find a reference to it right now. But the problem is not 16-bit vs 8-bit images.
Bill in WV
