Free Übercolor

When After Effects 7 was released a few years ago, the new color management features made our Übercolor plug-in obsolete, so it was quietly discontinued. (In fact, one might say that Adobe's Color Profile Converter bares a remarkable resemblance to Übercolor.) No big deal—this is all part of life as a plug-in developer.

But today I got an email from an AE 6.5 holdout looking to use it. So I thought what the heck, and uploaded a free version to the old product page.

Huge JPEG 2000 images

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment at the University of Arizona is hosting some gigantic images snapped (or rather scanned) by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The full version of the image shown below is 31,850 x 77,994 pixels! Each pixel represents 30 cm on the Martian surface.

It wasn't until Photoshop CS (8.0) that the program could even accept images bigger than 32,767 on a side, and few available file format modules can import such images, but j2k 2.01 can. Granted, doing so can take quite a while between the decompression process and all the virtual memory swapping Photoshop needs to do to.

A more efficient way to browse their JPEG 2000 images is by clicking on a link that brings up the Java-based IAS Viewer, which dynamically loads just the part of the image you're viewing at just the resolution you need, taking advantage of one of the key features in JPEG 2000. They also have a sweet Flash-based app to do the same. This reminds me of a personal feature wish for j2k to allow the user to reduce resolution when importing big files into Photoshop.

The idea behind the project is that members of the public will scan the images for features and report the interesting bits back to scientists.

MatchMover Pal

I decided to revive an unofficial fnord product, MatchMover Pal. This is a free plug-in for After Effects that lets you import tracker data from Realviz MatchMover, which has in my mind the best 2D tracker money can buy.

The Realviz tracking algorithm seems good enough, but what really makes MatchMover great is that it provides a timeline interface for creating multiple tracker keyframes and then tracking forward, backwards, or even bidirectionally. While tracking, the point is shown in a big magnified window so you can see if it wanders and the track accuracy is color coded. Finally, MatchMover loads image sequences very fast as it tracks. It really is the best tool for beating a tough tracking job into submission.

Of course, MatchMover's real mission is to re-create a 3D camera move—a much more complicated task, for which they charge accordingly. I doubt anyone would be interested in paying all that money for the 2D tracker alone, but if you already have it, MatchMover Pal will help you use it with After Effects. The plug-in will also create a 3D scene in After Effects from a Realviz .rz3 file.

Download

Mac | Win

PS - I realize this functionality could have probably been added through AE scripting instead of a plug-in, but AE scripting wasn't able to do everything I needed when I originally wrote it for AE6.

ProEXR 1.1 released

We've released an update to ProEXR that contains performance improvements, minor bug fixes, and enhancements to the After Effects Comp Creator. Everyone should go get it.

Probably my favorite feature, however, is a new report that you'll find in Photoshop's File Info dialog. Look in the Description field and you'll see a complete breakdown of all the channels and custom attributes included in the EXR. For those of us that can get files from a variety of places, it can be very interesting/useful to see exactly what's in a file. For example, some of the ILM Sample Files contain information like aperture, altitude, latitude, and longitude.

Since this report can get a little long in Photoshop CS3 and earlier, I've made a Custom File Info Panel that fills up the whole dialog with it. Download it here and drop it into the Custom File Info Panels folder:

Mac:

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/XMP/Custom File Info Panels/

Win:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\XMP\Custom File Info Panels\

Currently there is no way to save your own custom attributes in an EXR, but options for doing so could be explored if there is interest from users.

Incidentally, we've done some benchmarking recently and our tests have shown the After Effects plug-ins to be somewhat faster than Adobe's included OpenEXR plug-in. This can mostly be attributed to ProEXR providing a native AE plug-in, while the Adobe plug-in is actually made for Photoshop. So yet another reason to switch to ProEXR.

Controlling Alphas with ProEXR

One of the more unique features of ProEXR is that it lets you choose how alpha channels are treated. Usually Photoshop takes an alpha channel and makes a layer with transparency, but some people would prefer to have the alpha channel kept seperate, particularly if they plan to use it for something unrelated to transparency like a bump map.

In ProEXR, holding down the option (Mac) or alt (Win) keys as the file loads causes any alpha channel(s) to show up on separate layers.

Update: In ProEXR 1.3, holding down shift now brings up a dialog with these import options and more.

Under ProEXR naming conventions (see the manual), a layer named "RGBA" will save layers "R", "G", "B", and "A" in the file, but a layer "RGB" will skip the alpha. Then if you have a separate layer called "*A", the red channel in that layer will become "A".

Or to put it simply, if you separate the alpha by holding down option/alt, save the file without changing the layer names and you'll get the RGBA file you expect.

Another Update: ProEXR now includes ProEXR EZ, a simpler EXR plug-in that lets you send direct the alpha to the channels palette when you hold down the shift key.

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.