+1 vote here, from a digital painter and video game artist. Specially about the brush issue.
But I understand that it is a huge revamp in code. I can paint in my style with 8 bits brushes in 16 bits images (I lately always work on 16 bits images, as it gives more "room" for many operations), as my realistic style is kind of painterly and it gets disguised with the actual painting, in my special case, but for those hyper realistic painters (and retouch people) using airbrush-like techniques, it's surely a big problem (and also, I could guess, any manga artist, they're all about subtle gradients in their coloring. They can just use gradients, but....).
Also....maybe I'm wrong, but I was doing some tests today (although my beta is yet 23.40b8, I want to install b11 today, sorry if this has been already changed) , to see how to fix an 8 bit (very) soft shadow (a
layer style "outside shadow"), by merging the 16 bits layer with another (empty) 16 bits one, and it resulted a merged layer of 8 bits.
Sorry if there's a more advanced way to rasterize a layer, I'm just very newbie to this app (experienced in Photoshop, though) and could not find it (ie, right click on layer, "rasterize"). There's no problem for this test, as I merged them (previously getting the exact object selection, a rectangle) to actually apply a blur to the inverted selection (the shadow only), and see if a gaussian blur made a difference (I didn't see a difference, but it might be how I have my monitor configured (it's an Eizo ColorEdge CS, though, calibrated)).
But it could be a problem in any merging of 16 bits layers for other purposes, as the 16 bits subtlety (smooth gradients and other fine detail) of the 16 bits gradients is lost if merged to one of 8 bits. Please, feel free to correct me in my surely many mistakes, because while I have worked a lot in image editing (several fields), I am absolutely new to this software, and I can see how advanced it is, so, I might just be not using the correct workflows.
Kudos for such an amazing software, I truly love it.
