The other day someone told me that Lightroom 2's 16-bit print capability is the holy grail of printing. Up to now I've been perfectly happy with the standard 8-bit printing. But fearing I was missing out on something special I resolved to see for myself if adding another level of colors would make that big of a difference.

I print with a very nice printer that I absolutely love, the Epson Pro 3800. I know it's capable of printing 16-bits per pixel and I know Ligtroom 2 is capable of sending 16-bits of color data per channel to my 3800. But it's not all that simple. In order to actually print in 16-bit you need a Mac. And your Mac needs to be running OS X 10.5 or higher. And you need to download the new Epson driver which is still in the beta stage (Get the beta driver here.)

With these hurdles to jump, I guess I shouldn't feel so guilty about waiting until now to try 16-bit printing.

I choose the image you see here to test because I wanted an image with subtle variations between tones that would benefit from the extra bits and reduce color banding. For the first print I used my standard defaults for Epson's Premium Glossy Photo Paper: Print Resolution in Lightroom to 360 ppi and Color Management to Managed by Printer. In my Epson driver I set my Color Settings to Adobe RGB, my Print Quality to SuperPhoto-2880dpi and turned off High Speed. For the next print I left everything the same but checked the 16-bit Output box in Lightroom 2's Print module Print Job pane and 16 bit/Channel in Epson's Print Settings panel. The former file printed very quickly while the print with the extra bits slowed the printer considerably.

Unfortunately you won't be able to see the differences between the two test prints here on the screen, so you will have to trust me when I say I don't any differences between them. Did I do something wrong? Did I choose a poor example to test? Doesn't look like the Holy Grail to me... If you have any thoughts on 16-bit printing with Lightroom 2 I'd appreciate hearing from you.

PS: MacWorld is coming up next week and I have a busy schedule.

Book Passage in Corte Madera 
Sunday, January 4  7:00 PM   “ Ask the Experts” with Derrick Story and Deke McClelland

Power Tools Workshop: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
Monday & Tuesday (all day)

O'Reilly Booth: Macworld Conference Floor
Wednesday, January 7 1:00 pm
Thursday, January 8 4:00 pm
 
San Francisco Apple Store
Thursday, January 8 7:30 PM “Ask the Experts” with Derrick Story and Deke McClelland

Stop by one or all the events. I'd love to see you!