[Daniel Hruby]

I read this book about a year ago and found it to be incredibly informative. A must read for render heads. Now I want to dust it off again, thanks to this thread.

However, you can save out a 32 bit OpenEXR file by saving your rendering with a .EXR extension. It opens in Photoshop as a 32 bit image.

I am guessing now someone is going to say its not really a proper EXR???

[RonB]

hey Daniel,

Yeah that's cool...but what we all want...(we all? so far I guess it's me and Bubba), is the saving of all those wonderful channels to play with. Er...that is to exercise our creative freedom with I mean...

You know there is a free Photoshop plugin from the ILM site for OpenEXR. Don't know if it opens all the channels as layers or what. There is also a plugin for Lightwave to save all those nifty buffers too.

Come on Next Limit!

[Daniel Hruby]

I'm with you man!

After reading that book, I learned the value of such a format. I even bought a D300 Camera to do some HDR photography (still looking for time to do that though).

It really does seems silly that we can not save all the channels (alpha especially) into a single file. Even the existing photoshop file format could work for channel convenience.

I am sure NL is aware and will get it in there at some point. Let's hope it's in the next update!

[kami]

sorry for not having checked it myself, but does maxwell have any kind of exr support?
with those channels you mean Maxwell could save the alpha as an alpha channel into the document? which is also possible in .tiff if I remember it correctly

[RonB]

Hi Kami,
As Tom pointed out earlier in the thread, Maxwell supports EXR for IBL. What we are talking about is writing the output file to the OpenEXR format. Yes with OpenEXR Maxwell could write the alpha channel into the document...as well as 64 additional channels...each with independent pixel resolution and your choice of 16 or 32 bit floating point if you like. Those other channels can carry any kind of information you care to write to them...or NL programs into Maxwell to be able to write I suppose. All in one document...

Cheers,
Ron

[kami]

that'd be really good to have. I'm not a big fan of the .hdr because it takes ages to load in PS.
plus: having all channels included in one image would be a great advantage. Cinema4D does that, if you select psd as an output, you get the alpha channel as an PS alpha channel and you get channels for each object ID, and for depth, etc. Having the material ID's as channels would be a great advantage as well. The way it's working now, with those coloured material id images, it's not that easy to make a clear selection of one material...

greets, kami

[Bubbaloo]

However, you can save out a 32 bit OpenEXR file by saving your rendering with a .EXR extension. It opens in Photoshop as a 32 bit image.

I have tried that but it always gives me an error saying it can't write it.

[Daniel Hruby]

Weird. I just did it before posting my comments. render.exr opened in photoshop and i get the exposure slider and document type in the info area says OpenEXR format. It looks really washed out and sliding the exposure slider does not give very good results. nor does playing with levels really. So i usually save as png or tiff and goto post with that format.

[RonB]

I'm not a big fan of the .hdr because it takes ages to load in PS.

Kami, that's the whole point of OpenEXR, it's way faster than regular 32 bit HDR...way faster. It also has lossless compression to knock down your file saving space from 35 to 50%. There is a free Photoshop plugin on the ILM site now...not sure what all it does though.

Do yourself a favor and get the book...it explains it all. There's a link at the beginning of this thread.

Ron

[jfrancis]

Weird. I just did it before posting my comments. render.exr opened in photoshop and i get the exposure slider and document type in the info area says OpenEXR format. It looks really washed out and sliding the exposure slider does not give very good results. nor does playing with levels really. So i usually save as png or tiff and goto post with that format.

I'm still fairly new, but, so far...

I am finding I like saving from Maxwell in .hdr format. Then I take care in Photoshop CS3 to us 'exposure' to adjust the exposure of the .hdr before casting it to 16-bits.

If the image is a little hot, and if I disregard that slight overexposure and jump straight to 16-bits, I get some unattractive unrecoverable clipping at the high end -- so I try to make sure I'm happy with the 32-bit .hdr in Photoshop before I knock it down to 16-bits.