Quick Export to PNG converts 16-bit to 8-bit; how to export to PNG 16-bit?

[XilburQost]

I'm creating textures for 3D graphics materials and Photoshop's Quick Export to PNG is a welcome time saver. Unfortunately, I just discovered that when working with 16-bit PSD source files, Quick Export converts the resulting exported PNG to 8-bit; this can be a problem for displacement maps so I want the PNG to be 16bit.

Meanwhile, if I don't use Quick Export and flatten the source PSD and then save it as PNG, the resulting PNG is 16-bit.

There's a checkbox in Preferences > Quick Export Format titled "Smaller file (8-bit)", but that's not checked. Any suggestions as to how I can get Quick Export to output 16-bit PNGs? Thanks. Photoshop 23.1, Windows 11

[Bojan Živković]

If I can understand what is your goal then please read this about PNG file format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics

"PNG supports palette-based images (with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), grayscale images (with or without an alpha channel for transparency), and full-color non-palette-based RGB or RGBA images. The PNG working group designed the format for transferring images on the Internet, not for professional-quality print graphics; therefore non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK are not supported. A PNG file contains a single image in an extensible structure of chunks, encoding the basic pixels and other information such as textual comments and integrity checks documented in RFC 2083."

[D Fosse · Accepted solution]

Save is your only option. You could make an action with a keyboard shortcut to save time

Export always reduces to 8 bits per channel, because it is intended for web/screen/mobile devices, and 16 bit output normally makes no sense.

The "smaller file" option is not 8 bits per channel, but 8 bits total, in other words indexed color with max 256 colors.

[XilburQost]

D Fosse, makes sense. Thank you!