Photoshop 7 and 16 bit TIFF files

[steve_dawson1]

Can anyone shed any light on a Photoshop mystery I am experiencing? I

can't properly open 16 bit TIFF files in Photoshop 7 on my desktop,

but they work fine on my two laptops.

 

The desktop is a fast Pentium machine with 1.5GB RAM. The older of

the laptops is a 450MHz Pentium III with 250MB RAM. The Photoshop

installation is exactly the same in all three cases - from the very

same disk.

 

The desktop runs XP. One of the laptops runs XP, and the older one,

Windows 2000.

 

16 bit TIFFs open on the laptops (albeit slowly on the old one I

mentioned), obviously functionality is restricted, but they work as

they should. On the desktop the files apparently open, but all I get

a window full of grey noise.

 

This is true of 16 bit TIFFs from two different RAW converters, and

from a scanner, and the same individual files open on the laptops but

not on the desktop. 8 bit TIFFs work fine on all three PCs.

 

Obviously something differs in the desktop installation/configuration

from the laptop systems, but I can't figure out what. Any guidance

would be appreciated.

[steven_clark]

IS it trying to open it in Mac byte-order? Is it trying to open a compressed file as uncompressed or vice-versa? Those are at least a couple thoughts I have.

[minicucci]

I'm not a Windows user, but could it be authorization? I think you can only have two installs

and use only one at a time. Maybe that's why the third machine will not work.

[mendel_leisk]

Yeah but 8 bit opens ok.

[dave_dube]

Not sure how you actually saved a 16bits/channel tiff file(did you use compression?) but if you save it in PSD format and 16bits, it should open fine.

[dave_dube]

Forgot to mention, in CS2, you can save a 16bits/channel into tiff, uncompressed by first converting to a Smart Object and then it works fine.

[dave_dube]

One last thought/question, once you've made your corrections, why would you want to save to a 16 bit TIFF? The 16 bits allows headroom for channel corrections but then would normally be converted to 8 bits since all of the dynamic range can't be viewed anyway. You would be saving your master as a 16 bit RAW for future use (or PSD).

 

PS - forget the Smart Object thing, I think it only saves to other suite programs.

[dave_dube]

This is starting to feel like my own private forum.

 

I think I figured out what's happening. This was rather an interesting situation because I too scan slides to 16 bit TIFF. They will open fine however, you can't make changes to them and attempt to save again to 16 bit TIFF. Once any change is attempted, you would need to save to PSD if you don't want to down sample.