[polynurb]

Hi JD,

looks like something is broken with image export from fire.
It saves png when jpg is selected. files are ok, but i noticed because PS won't open.. xnview has no problem displaying the file.

also it would be great if this dialogue could remember the file type last used.

thnx!

daniel

[kami]

I noticed this as well

[JDHill]

I don't seem able to reproduce this. I can save .jpg either by selecting that format from the filter dropdown, or by typing output.jpg directly, even with the filter still on png. Do you know of anything special I need to do?

[polynurb]

here not really.. in fact the same goes for bmp.. all i get are pngs not matter if from drop doen menu or typed.

[JDHill]

So just to confirm the exact scenario, if you hit the save button, select .bmp in the dropdown, type output.bmp into the box, and hit OK -- the file is saved as png, and is named output.png?

[polynurb]

no.. not quite the file will be called output.bmp.. but actually has png information in it.

(windows thumbnail/preview will show it ok though)

[JDHill]

Well, that is an important bit of information. I don't have PS, and none of the editors/viewers I used to open the file are alerting me that it's really a PNG -- but there is definitely a PNG label at the top when opening the file in notepad.

[Polyxo]

Well, that is an important bit of information. I don't have PS, and none of the editors/viewers I used to open the file are alerting me that it's really a PNG -- but there is definitely a PNG label at the top when opening the file in notepad.

Now I am franky a bit puzzled JD: You don't have Photoshop?
But how can you properly test the whole > 8 Bit range of images then?
Or Colour-Schemes like ProPhoto which are only of proper use when utilizing Photoshop or Nuke or any other > 8 Bit Editor.
Lately I wanted to use Pro-Photo and set this from the Rhino-Plugin but instead I get ECI-RGB...

As it doesn't really make sense to support this Colour-Space in an 8 Bit Editor one probably can't even figure out that something is wrong
when not using Photoshop. I just opened the a test file which the plugin renders with the wrong Colour-Profile
in Corel-Paint - it just discards even the ECI-Profile without asking (and of course doesn't support ProPhoto)

I realize that it is not in your hands to actually change anything about how the Engine handles Images.
Then again I regularly run into issues with >8 Bit imagery created in Photoshop or other Sources - if you saw
this yourself regularly I am sure you would give whomever responsible an earlier nudge .

Sure you have taken all sorts of provisions for testing also higher Bitdepths...
Still I really think you "should" use the Program most Render-Professionals utilize to create and edit their Bitmaps and use alongside with Maxwell.
Photoshop can do absolutely everything what cheaper Programs do but it supports a lot of CG-specific stuff none, really none of the cheaper
Competitors can do. I could well imagine that there's cheaper Developer-Versions.

[JDHill]

Why would I test those things? Rhino supports workflows with which I am particularly familiar, but with which someone like Jeff LaSor (just to pick a name) probably has zero experience; is he doing something wrong if he's not an expert every area of use that I am? Likewise, Maxwell supports many workflows which have no applicability for me personally, and I don't see becoming an expert on them as being particularly useful for writing better plugins. In this case, we are talking about saving the current Maxwell Fire buffer to an image file; since it's .NET saving the pixels, and not Maxwell, that's why you don't find it supporting color spaces and such. Perhaps I can ask the engine to save the image, but I don't know if it's safe to do that during rendering; I'll check it out.

[Polyxo]

Jeremy,
Please don't understand this disrespectfully.
I did by no means ask you to get an Expert on all sorts of Image-Processing.
What I did was suggesting to use a tool which you detect that things went wrong.

Maybe I indeed have wrong ideas about Programming - but in the case of my Colour-Profiles:
Wouldn't one write an image with all all of these Settings and check whether they are hooked
up correctly? Not by running some analysis tool - but hands on?

[JDHill]

No offense taken, Holger. I grasp now that you're not referring to saving the Maxwell Fire image, but to color spaces in actual Maxwell Render output, and I do find a problem there: in the MXS, the color spaces are specified not by name, but by their index in the list, and that order has been changed. So they're screwed up -- ProPhoto is now 8th in the list, and if you choose the 8th item in the plugin, which is ColorMatch, you will get ProPhoto. I'll fix this up.

As to your comment, I don't think that hands-on testing of everything is a very realistic expectation; there are too many combinations of application version, operating system and version, and processor architecture to make that a viable option. So while you definitely test what you can, for the most part, reducing bugs in software is really more about good coding practice. That means that you write logic-based tests for your code, but those won't generally catch something like this color space issue, since it is not a problem of logic: the plugin and Maxwell simply disagree about where each item should be in the list.