Converting colour profiles in 24 vs 48 bits

[tomczak]

Does it make much difference if a 24bit file, which is in say AdobeRGB, is opened into a working space (say sRGB) (or the other way around), and then rather than converting it on Open into the working colour space, wait for colour profile conversion after the file is converted to 48bit depth first? Or perhaps it is already done this way internally?

I remember having trouble before with blocked v. deep shadows when converting colour profiles for printing and I think that it had to do with the straight-line section at the beginning of sRGB gamma curve, which was exacerbated by the low bit depth, but I can't remember what the solution was (it's somewhere in the old board, and I probably lightened the shadows a bit by hand after converting to 48 bit and adding random noise - at the time 24-48 bit conversion inserted zeros between actual values, not random bits).

[jsachs]

Off the top of my head, I doubt this would make a visible difference. It's probably worth doing the experiment and subtracting the two results to see where the differences are, if any.