Okay so bear with me here. I'm having a lot of trouble figuring this out and it's frustrating.
It appears that Photoshop or the Adobe Camera Raw Editor is automatically down converting my 14 bit Canon (6D) RAW files to 8 bit color depth.
I took some photos to illustrate my problem and maybe someone can shed some light on the issue.
In the first photo you can see some very serious, very bad banding. In my workflow options at the bottom you can see it says "16 bit". You can also see that this is a CR2 RAW file. It says 16 bit but it's plainly obvious from the extreme banding that the photo has been down converted to 8 bit. It's actually always defaulted to 8 bit and when I change it to 16 bit by clicking that link nothing changes and the image looks the same.
As a comparison I opened up the same photo in DPP. There was no visible banding and I exported the photo to a TIFF. The second photo is that photo being displayed in PS.
So, the exact same RAW file processed through DPP to a TIFF shows no visible banding. It appears that Adobe Camera Raw is downconverting my RAW files to 8 bit automatically.
It is clearly not a display (dithering) issue, as you can see it looks fine in the file that was processed with DPP.
I have done a lot of searching and have not found a solution but I do not understand what is happening here. I have found threads in other forums where people have the same issue but none of the answers provided actually solve the problem.
I would really prefer to do my RAW processing in PS but it will not be an option for me unless I can get this automatic down converting of bit depth figured out.
I've also tried processing RAW files through Serif Affinity Beta and it correctly displays my RAW files in the correct color bit depth.
I can't understand why ACR is doing this.