Increasing the color depth of an image

Working with advanced color features : Increasing the color depth of an image

If an image has a color depth of less than 24-bit, you may want to increase the color depth so you can use a wider range of effect and correction commands, many of which only work on images with 16 million colors. Depending on the color depth of your image, you can also increase an image to 16 colors (4-bit) or 256 colors (8-bit).

To increase the color depth of an image

Edit workspace

• Choose Image  Increase Color Depth, and choose one of the following:

• 16 color palette

• 256 color palette

• RGB - 8 bits/channel

• RGB - 16 bits/channel

Color depths not available for the active image are grayed out.

If your image has a palette, for example if you have a 256 color (8-bit) image, and you need to maintain the palette colors, you can save the palette before increasing the color depth. After editing the image, you can reload the palette. For more information, see Working with image palettes.

If you are increasing or decreasing several images to the same color depth, you can add a button to the toolbar that you can click to automatically set color depth. For more information, see Customizing toolbars.