ProEXR in CS2?

People have been asking if they really need to get Photoshop CS3 Extended to use ProEXR.

The answer is: not necessarily. But only CS3 Extended does layers in floating point (32 Bits/Channel mode), so other versions won't have access to what I consider to be the biggest feature in ProEXR.

If you're OK with that and still interested in a variety of compression options and retention of color information, go ahead and try it in regular CS3 or in CS2 (the first version that had floating point). While not officially supported, I will admit that a little testing was done in those versions and some code was added to make ProEXR work in them. And heck, it runs in trial mode for 15 days, so try it.

On the After Effects end, I would have loved to get the OpenEXR plug-ins working back in AE7, but it shipped with a bug that prevented floating point images from having 3D Channels. So you really do need CS3 to run those.

HD Photo: Not Too Shabby

You know that we here at fnord have a thing for file formats. Don't ask why, we just do.

Well, there's a new format coming down the pipe, and it's HD Photo. It looks like the format to rule them all, so of course it must come from Microsoft. And that's why it pains me to say this: HD Photo actually looks really great. You can try it right now by getting their free Photoshop plug-in.

There are very few other formats that you really need to keep around if HD Photo can do all it says it can. It has all the important features of JPEG 2000 (see our j2k plug-in), but without the high CPU overhead that's preventing JP2 from appearing inside a camera or a whole lot of of other places. And yet the compression appears just as good as JPEG 2000, all while adding one very important feature—floating point pixel support. In very un-Microsoft fashion, they're providing free source code so it can be implemented on non-Windows platforms and even trying to make it an official JPEG standard called JPEG XR. (I'm sure the name's similarity to "OpenEXR" is purely coincidental.)

HD Photo also has one other benefit JPEG 2000 never had: the world's most pushy software company pushing on its behalf. HD Photo will be in your computer at some point (it already is if you're running Vista), the only question is: will you use it? Eventually, you probably will.

Not that HD Photo does everything. The product manager (interviewed here) sees HD Photo as replacing RAW, but that's one format I don't see it usurping. The whole point of RAW is to let users make decisions themselves that are normally made by the camera, and for that you need the raw CCD data. But he's right that HD Photo will replace Raw for people who are using it only because they don't want to lose bits when their camera converts to TIFF or JPEG, and are otherwise just sticking with the camera's decisions. If a camera saves floating point HD Photo files, clipping, color gamut, and bit depth issues will be of no concern (although using up space on the memory card will). That's all assuming Microsoft convinces camera makers to adopt it, of course.

OpenEXR is somewhat safe from HD Photo, although one big feature that HD Photo includes is variable lossy compression in floating point that you can tune with a slider. Compare to B44 compression in EXR, which is also lossy, but not adjustable. I really wish OpenEXR had this.

OpenEXR will probably stay the preferred format of high-end production because it supports a few key features that HD Photo left out, such as unlimited image channels of varying data types. (For some reason HD Photo will only support 8 channels, which would only amount to 2 layers in an EXR.) Also, having ILM behind OpenEXR and a community of industry professionals contributing ensures that the format will continue to keep pace with real production needs, which MS could never promise. But like DPX before it, OpenEXR may one day be familiar only to the pros and just a funny name to casual HDR users.

Incidentally, with all that free source code from Microsoft, you might think that OpenEXR could just add HD Photo as a new compression type. Wrong! Microsoft has cleverly worded their license to say that the public HD Photo code can't be used to do anything except support the HD Photo format. While what you do in the privacy of your own home is up to you, ILM could never get away with copying those (patented) algorithms into the OpenEXR code base. (BTW, ILM does not have this restriction on the OpenEXR code—they let you use it for anything you want.)

So HD Photo sounds really great. It's nice to finally see something coming out of Microsoft Research besides Siggraph papers. And yet there's the rub—do you really want to switch over to a format based on Microsoft-controlled patents? They say they won't be enforced, but do you trust them? I know Bob Cringely never would.

ProEXR Ships

We've shipped our first new plug-in in quite some time: ProEXR. Check it out.

 

 

This is one of those plug-ins that I was just dying to have for myself. I've been into the whole HDR thing for a while, and OpenEXR is definitely the format de rigueur. But there were so many things it could do that Adobe (and many other companies) weren't supporting, I had to intervene.

You may have seen that the After Effects plug-ins are open source—that's a first for us. Of course they're free too…although you get them in the commercial download. Hope that's not too confusing.

And you may be interested to know that file format plug-ins creating layers in Photoshop isn't exactly a supported thing and at several times during development I thought this plug-in would never make it. It was an exciting night when everything actually appeared to be working.

Enjoy!

YAB

Yet Another Blog. First I caved in and got a cell phone…now this.

But at least this blog isn't about me (Brendan) but about fnord software. And if you got this far, that's probably something you're at least a little interested in.

I'll post answers to common questions I'm getting asked, maybe add a blurb about something too esoteric to include in a product page. And I'll probably talk about some more general graphics topics too, but I promise not to post pictures of my cat (which I don't have), or my car (which I don't drive), or what I had for dinner (which I don't eat…oh wait, it was pizza).

All graphics and software all the time, folks. Enjoy!