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)