Is it impossible to modify a RAW file in Photoshop?

I needed to modify an image using the clone tool in Photoshop and opened the RAW file from Lightroom in Photoshop to make the modification. When I saved the image it saved as 'filename-Edit.tif' next to the RAW file. I added that image to my catalog so I could keep track of it.
What I really wanted to do was to make the modification to the RAW file and save by overwriting the old RAW file.
I think that may not be possible.
Could someone here tell me why the RAW file could not be modified in Photoshop. Is this to ensure that the RAW file will remain original, with modifications only appearing in the sidecar .xmp file? This is fine and good, but just wanted to make sure that that is the only way it can be done and that modifications in Photoshop will yield a new separate file upon saving.
Thanks,
Ken

What I really wanted to do was to make the modification to the RAW file and save by overwriting the old RAW file.
That is indeed as you found out impossible.
Could someone here tell me why the RAW file could not be modified in Photoshop.
The reason is that the RAW file is a mosaiced file with direct sensor data at each pixel. Usually two out of four pixels have a green filter, while 1 out of four have a red and another 1 out of 4 a green pixel. The data is usually stored with 12 or 14 bit precision for each pixel. All this is inherently incompatible with the pixel model of a program like Photoshop. To edit such files in Photoshop, you need to demosaic them to full three-channel RGB data, render them into a certain color space, gamma correct them, sharpen them, etc. This is what ACR and Lightroom do for you. So you cannot edit the underlying data using Photoshop. If you edit in Photoshop, you will always have to create a new file.
P.S. you might have noticed that the edit in Photoshop creates a far larger tif file than the original RAW. This is because of the Bayer mosaic. Say you have a 12 MP camera. When shooting 12-bit RAW, this will result in a 18 MB uncompressed dataset (12MP*12bits/(8bits/byte)= 18MB). Saved losslesly compressed and including a jpeg preview that gets you approximately to 12 MB for a typical RAW file from that camera. When you render this into a 16 bit tiff, you suddenly need a full 3x16=48 bits per pixel! So this results in a 72 MB uncompressed tiff file, which will probably compress to about 50% of that. More than 3 times larger than the original RAW!

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