Content Aware Fill at 16-bit? (i.e. without active selection)

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
May 26, 2021
3 replies
1086 views

Hi guys, newbie here. Quetsion: is it possible to apply Content Aware Fill at 16-bit? I mean, I knew that any active selection reduces the bit-depth to 8-bit. So, is there a way to use Content Aware Fill without selecting an active area? Thanks in advance.

How to

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Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

Did you know that pixel-peeping can drive you mad? Photoshop's automatic fixes have evolved over the years and are truly amazing, but they are a long way short of perfect, and likely to leave compromised results far in excess any quality loss from a temporary localised drop to 8 bit. That's if that even happens.

If you are outputting to a very large high quality print, then it might pay to obsess about IQ, but if that was the case then COF is not the best tool for the job anyway. If you have a subtle gradient that covers a significant percentage of your image, then 16 bit will be advantagous. Same thing with greyscale/B&W. The bottom line is can you see a difference, but a lot of the time a computer monitor is not the best tool for discerning that difference.

Our @D Fosse does museum quality work, and has to maximise quality, so I wonder what he would say?

D Fosse

Community Expert

This isn't a big deal. Although it's correct that selections are 8 bit depth (legacy code), the underlying data are still 16 bit as Andrew points out.

If you use the selection to make a mask, the mask itself is still 16 bit, but the data contained in that mask will have 8 bit stepping. So you can in principle get into banding trouble if you make extreme adjustments based on that mask/selection. In practice - meh, not a big concern.

If you feel particularly paranoid that day, you can get around it by copying Lab L data and pasting it into a new mask. That's a pretty complex operation by itself, so it pays to make an action to do it if you feel you need it. I have one, but rarely bother to use it.

To be clear - painting directly into a mask is entirely end-to-end 16 bit and not affected.

I

Ilario5E19Author

Participant

Thanks so much for all your advices guys!

@D Fosse Many thanks for your kind reply. Just 2 questions:
1. Just to be sure, when I scale with Content-Aware Scale (or with free Transform), I'm still working at 16-bit, right?
2. Can you kindly elaborate the Lab L method? It sounds to me like a Luminosity mask method... Sure! I could make a black “hole” with the paint tool directly on the “wrong” area of the image, then create a mask for black-only with Lumi32 (that I own) then choose Select! This produces an active selection, it's true, but this time being made by Lumi32, the selection should be at 32-bit (in spite of being an active selection) because not made with Photoshop code. Does it make sense?

TheDigitalDog

Inspiring

@Ilario5E19 wrote:

I mean, I knew that any active selection reduces the bit-depth to 8-bit.

The data is the data; so if you have high bit data (Photoshop calls anything more than 8-bits per color "16-bits" even though it's not), the content aware will be high bit. The selection is moot in terms of the data being processed.

As Mohammad stated, you must make a selection so by all means do so.

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"

Mohammad.Harb

Community Expert

Content aware fill requires selection . It cannot be done without selction .

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