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Author Topic: ACR appears to be automatically downconverting RAW files to 8 bit color depth...  (Read 15016 times)

wigasper

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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.
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Redcrown

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In ACR, change from sRGB to ProPhoto and see what happens. Also, cycle through the various ACR profiles and see what happens.
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kirkt

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And, to follow up on redcrown's suggestion, into which color space are you converting your image in DPP? sRGB as well?

in your ACR screenshot, that big white spike on the left margin of the histogram is an indicator of problems.  This is not a typical image and the underexposure does no favors for the image in sRGB as well.  You probably need a larger (than sRGB) color space to convert into for this image.

kirk
« Last Edit: February 25, 2015, 10:45:49 pm by kirkt »
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digitaldog

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And of course view the results at 100% zoom.
Quote
It says 16 bit but it's plainly obvious from the extreme banding that the photo has been down converted to 8 bit.
It has to be 16-bit  ;D
Does anything change when you force a conversion to 8-bits per color like file size? If so, which is what I suspect, it's really 16-bit as it should be, the banding is something else.
I like the idea of trying a different color space but suspect it's the camera profile perhaps? Banding shows up no matter the rendering settings?
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Author "Color Management for Photographers".

wigasper

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Okay thanks guys. Changing the Camera Profile under the Camera Calibration tab fixed things. Adobe Standard profile was causing the banding somehow.

I tend to consider myself pretty PS savvy but apparently some pretty simple things just go right over my head...

And a lot of my frustration came from the fact that nobody in the ACR Forum on Adobe's website could help me at all, but you guys got right to the issue.

Thanks!!
« Last Edit: March 03, 2015, 11:32:46 am by wigasper »
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Lustrous

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(A late comment on this thread-)
If you Double-click on the details shown just below the image window of ACR, you open a dialog where you can set your Color Space and Bit Depth to open an image in Photoshop-
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