Check with your service bureau. They’ll be able to recommend a format/colour depth that works that will give you the results you’re looking for. If you provide 16-bit artwork, and their rasterizer only handles 8-bit natively, your project may suffer odd colour shifts.
Note that if your artwork is going to be formed in vinyl, rather than just being printed on vinyl, colour depth has little meaning as you’ll get the colours of vinyl your service bureau provides. That and they’ll want vector artwork tweaked to prevent features smaller than 3-5 mm (eg no gradients, hairlines, etc.).
It’s really not necessary to go to 16 bit- your file sizes will be twice as large, and you won’t have access to some of the Photoshop tools while working in 16-bit (similar to working in CMYK mode and the filters are greyed out). Any difference in quality would be negligible, if even noticeable at all.
There are some scenarios where it might benefit you to use 16 bit, but the tradeoff in most situations is not worthwhile.
(see the article in the link below, in the section under “Are more than 8-bits necessary, the paragraph starting with “ne reason to work with 16-bit images in Photoshop is…”)
If someone tells you otherwise, ask them to provide you with some information to back it up first, just so you can be certain before changing your workflow.
Check with your service bureau. They’ll be able to recommend a format/colour depth that works that will give you the results you’re looking for. If you provide 16-bit artwork, and their rasterizer only handles 8-bit natively, your project may suffer odd colour shifts.
Note that if your artwork is going to be formed in vinyl, rather than just being printed on vinyl, colour depth has little meaning as you’ll get the colours of vinyl your service bureau provides. That and they’ll want vector artwork tweaked to prevent features smaller than 3-5 mm (eg no gradients, hairlines, etc.).
It’s really not necessary to go to 16 bit- your file sizes will be twice as large, and you won’t have access to some of the Photoshop tools while working in 16-bit (similar to working in CMYK mode and the filters are greyed out). Any difference in quality would be negligible, if even noticeable at all.
There are some scenarios where it might benefit you to use 16 bit, but the tradeoff in most situations is not worthwhile.
(see the article in the link below, in the section under “Are more than 8-bits necessary, the paragraph starting with “ne reason to work with 16-bit images in Photoshop is…”)
http://digitaloutput.net/content/ContentCT.asp?P=350
If someone tells you otherwise, ask them to provide you with some information to back it up first, just so you can be certain before changing your workflow.