# CS6 Filters Not Showing & 8-Bit



## Sandyjas (Jun 24, 2014)

I have Photoshop CS6.  I just set most of the Preferences.  My Nikon D800E camera produces NEF raw at 16 bit at approx. 40MB a file. I have an iMac Desktop with Mountain Lion 10.8.4.  Until I got CS6 I worked with Photoshop Elements 1.0.  

So I was just working around on some pictures in CS6 for the first time, and I found out some of my filters, in the filter menu are grayed out. I went to PS preferences and checked "show all filter gallery groups and names."  This did not help.  Further reading in my Photoshop CC book said Photoshop has a limited number of filters in 16 bit.   (filter gallery, artistic, brush stroke, distort, pixelate, sketch, texture, digmarc are most that are grayed out.)  
A friend asked if my Image > Mode was set to RGB.  It was.  Then I changed the 16 bit to 8 bit in Image > Mode and every filter then showed up in the list!  Here is my question:

When I edit certain things in the future, I may need to use these filters.  I don't know that much about the underlying PS structure so… 

I don't want to change my image to 8-bit so I can use one of these filters because I want my image to remain a 16-bit after I edit it and take it out of Photoshop.  Is there a work around?  What can I do?  

Could I duplicate the image in 16-bit and change the copy to 8-bit and run the filter on the 8-bit version?  (Can you change it to 8-bit in PS?) Then drag the filter layer or merged layers containing the filtered layer from the 8-bit to a layer in the original 16-bit picture?  [I don’t know my way around  this.]  I know how I want to edit, but in Photoshop Elements I was using only Tiff 8-bit and Nef 12-bit.  (If I did apply any filters to a Nikon D100 Nef 12-bit raw file, I cannot remember.  I never had any problems with filters in Elements.)  But in CS6 all is different.   Thank You for your help!

Thank You Very Much For Your Help,

Sandy


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## clee01l (Jun 24, 2014)

If you are planning to save a finished file as JPEG, you will be going to 8-bit in the JPEG.  If that is the case, then do everything you need to do in 16-bit and when nothing remains except 8 bit filters convert to 8 bit and finish.


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## Sandyjas (Jun 26, 2014)

I'm mostly going to save in Tiff or PSD.  (And I made a mistake.  My camera's biggest bit depth is 14-bit.)  I don't know what to do.  Would the insert work?  And if I inserted an 8-bit filter layer, into my original 16-bit file file I was working on in Photoshop, when I was finished editing it and flattened all the layers, would the file still be 16-bit?  Sorry, my background knowledge is scant.  

Also, when in Camera Raw, is it safe to tell Camera Raw to open my 14-bit Nef Raws in Photoshop as 16-bit?

Thank You for helping.  I have time to read some books, but still don't know things, or some things.

Thank You,

Sandy


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## clee01l (Jun 27, 2014)

NEFs can be either 12-14 bits of color.  I have a Nikon and understood what you meant.  ACR or the ACR component of LR converted the RAW to 16bit RGB automatically. All processing is using the ProPhotoRGB color 16 bit color space.  The 14 bits gets padded with two zeros to make 16 bits of color for each channel before any post processing so no color is lost and with 16 bits you have a wider ranges of colors that can be computed in post processing.  When you save to 16 bit TIFF you can get all of the colors available in the ProPhoto envelop.   If you convert 16 bit to 8 bit, colors that are not in the 8 bit spectrum get converted to the nearest 8 bit color value.
In Photoshop you can process 8, 16 or 32 bit all the way, but as you discover, not all of the filter algorithms have been written to process in all color densities.  So if you want to use an 8 bit filter,  you need to convert all layers to 8 bit to use it.  This is unfortunate since you want to output 16 bit TIFF.  If you make the decision to convert to 8 bit to use a filter, you might as well save the final as 8 bit TIFF, because you do not benefit at this point from having a file that is twice as big.


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## Sandyjas (Jun 28, 2014)

Thank You!  I'm clearer on this now.  

Thank You,

Sandy


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