ProEXR 1.7 available

Another six months, another two seasons, and another free 0.1 update to ProEXR. Version 1.7 includes some pretty nifty improvements and additions. They are:

1. Premiere Pro plug-in
OpenEXR is beginning to spread beyond the rarified world of 3D rendering and digital compositing. More and more it is being used to send images between editing software and color correction tools, and OpenEXR is also the foundation for the upcoming ACES digital cinema workflow. ProEXR for Premiere lets you import and export OpenEXR sequences in Premiere Pro. It supports timecode, all the EXR compression options, and takes advantage of Premiere's native floating point pipeline.

2. After Effects performance boost
More work has been put into getting performance gains out of the AE plug-ins. In some tests, the new plug-ins are twice as fast as what was released in version 1.6, which was already an improvement over 1.5, the version currently shipping in After Effects. The new OpenEXR, EXtractoR, and IDentifier plug-ins are project-compatible and free, so don't waste any time replacing your current After Effects versions with the latest and greatest.

3. ProEXR EZ is free
No longer be held captive by fnord software's greedy capitalists! More information below.

4. VRimg support
Many VRay users convert their multipass VRimg files to OpenEXR and then open them with ProEXR. Now they can skip a step and open VRimg files directly in Photoshop and After Effects. (Both programs prefer you use the 3-letter file extension ".vri" instead of ".vrimg".)

Enjoy!

ProEXR EZ is Free

A fact of life for plug-in developers is that a good idea for a plug-in today may become a new feature in the main program tomorrow. If you have saved an OpenEXR file out of the Photoshop CS6 public beta, you will have seen this dialog:

Which might remind you of another dialog:

So thank you, Adobe, I'm glad that you decided to give Photoshop users some more options for saving EXR files. And I'm glad I could help them out in the meantime with ProEXR EZ, which I'm now making free. Download ProEXR 1.7 and run ProEXR EZ without a serial number, even in versions of Photoshop prior to CS6.

But even if you're using CS6 and don't need to read or write multi-channel EXR files, you'll still want to use ProEXR EZ instead of Photoshop's built-in OpenEXR module. Our plug-in has these advantages:

• Photoshop's input options dialog comes up every time, while ProEXR EZ's only comes up if you hold down the shift key. You can also set a preference to make it come up every time if you want and set your own default settings.
• ProEXR EZ lets you write Luminance/Chroma images, while Photoshop can only read them.
• ProEXR EZ let you write files with Zip16, B44, and B44A compression, which Photoshop has left out for some reason.
• ProEXR lets you write out files in 32-bit float for the rare time when EXR's 16-bit float is not enough.
• ProEXR EZ includes the ProEXR File Description that tells you about all the channels and metadata in the EXR file you're using.
• ProEXR EZ reads and writes EXR color space information while Photoshop does not.

As a refresher, the following plug-ins are free in ProEXR:

• ProEXR EZ for Photoshop
• OpenEXR, EXtractoR, IDentifier plug-ins for After Effects
• OpenEXR for Premiere
• ProEXR Comp Creator for After Effects (part of ProEXR AE)

The following ProEXR features require a license:

• ProEXR for Photoshop (read/write layered EXR files)
• ProEXR AE (write layered EXR files out of After Effects)
• VRimg support (part of ProEXR for Photoshop and ProEXR AE)