Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Hi

I'm tripping on something strange here and thought perhaps someone could show me in the right direction. I render a TIF-file with embedded channels. The channels show up if I view the file with Preview on Mac or in Windows Photo Viever, but they show up as "Pages". Much like a PDF or something.

If I open it in Photoshop (CC2014), I get no layers except the Render pass. No channels except the usual one.

What's going on here?

Best regards

- Björn

Photoshop can't read them. You can instead try EXR with layers but Photoshop can't read those either, unless you use a plugin called ProEXR. EXR, especially half float is more efficient than tiff anyway.

Oh.

So you're saying photoshop can't read TIFF layers, but Windows Photo Viewer can? That's,. surprising to say the least.

Photoshop can save TIFF layers, right? Are there different kind of TIFF layers?

Regards

- Björn

Yes, PS supports TIFF layers and we need to look into that. It should be a compatibility issue with tagging the layers.

I see, yes just browsing through the wikipedia page for tiff there seems to bee support for both something called pages and layers,.

Regards

- Björn

Apparently, layers are something special with PS and not a standard for TIFF format. Although, we will consider adding PSD and/or TIFF w/layers. See the links for more info:
http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/4844889

Strange.

I though TIFF was an adobe format alltogher though. And it's weird this concept of "pages" in which all the maxwell channels/buffers DO show up, but only in the regular windows picture viewer.

I seems the concept of pages in included in Baseline TIFF, readers must be prepared that there might more pages but are not required to read them. Layers however are no in Baseline tiff specification. If I was Photoshop, I would read and interpret pages, perhaps as layers. But I'm not photoshop, I'm just a regular guy.

Regards

- Björn

I'd suggest EXR anyway - personally stay away from TIF since the implementations tend to be all over the map. Each software handles them slightly differently.

Back in the dark ages of file formats (pre-EXR) using TIFFs for displacements would get you occasional random value shifts of 1-2 off 50% gray. Doesnt sound bad until you realize it drives your render time way up since you're displacing everything you meant to NOT displace by an imperceptible amount.

oh, that's terrible! and very hard to troubleshoot. I'll stick to something else perhaps, I just found it very odd.