One problem facing owners of high-end digital microscope cameras and scanners is dealing with 12-bit TIFF format images. Because of a vagueness in the TIFF specification [1], some prograins do not load 12-bit TIFF images at all, or do not handle them gracefully. Unfortunately, Adobe Photoshop is one such program.
A common problem with 12-bit images that do load in Photoshop is that the image appears to be totally black once loaded. This occurs when the camera stores the most significant bits of the image in the lower 12-bits of a 16-bit data space. Photoshop, when converting to its internal 16-bit representation, does not scale these properly, resulting in a low contrast image. This can present problems with viewing the images, or performing any processing or measurement steps that you might desire.