Photoshop CS4 and EXR background problem

[Joost Ink]

I didn't bother to to post, don't use PS too often with exr's...but if I did I'd remind them of this exact same issue back when tga's were more popular, PS would treat tga's alpha areas the same way until enough people complained and they released a a fixed tga loader... wouldn't surprise me if it was the same programmer that was behind that debacle too

This programmer is talking about the tga issue in the discussion; fact is we (users) have been using the tga file format wrong, just like we are using the exr format wrong, we are so stupid.

[trixian]

They do the exact same thing with png files too.

[tooves]

Solution!!!

.....yeah i'm an idiot.

[Joost Ink]

We finally found a solution to this.... it has been bugging us for a long time as well....

You need to replace the CS4 OpenEXR.8BI file with the PhotoshopCS2 version of that file (possibly an earlier version may work also, but we had CS2 on hand).

Obviously this requires that you have access to the CS2 8BI... which might make things difficult for some, but thats what PMs are for...(hint hint)

This seems to work for both CS3 and CS4...

This is allready a known work around, clifton starts his topic with it, the thing is: in CS4 it doesnt work!

[Clifton Santiago]

Yeah, I couldn't get that trick to work in CS4... tooves, you did?

[rmejia]

Is there any other alternate file format to use instead of OpenEXR? Tiff?

The photoshop engineer responded to the last comments saying:
"Most likely you misunderstand something about the concepts involved, or you are just using the wrong file format for your work."
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b70e35

[RErender]

That post made me want to flame that Chris guy more than any of the others, lol, what does Cox rhyme with?

The question is "is there some other software to spend your money on other than PS?",

[Joost Ink]

The question is "is there some other software to spend your money on other than PS?",

I was looking at GIMP the other day, which looks very promising the last version is almost as complete as PS, they don't support exr or 32 bit images yet, but as far as I understand they are working on it. And being a product from the community FOR the community, I have much trust in them.

[rmejia]

I would have expected more diplomacy from Adobe representatives on their forum. That Cox guy should probably get his own radio show and talk about politics

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

why dont we start a new common post there?????
there must be a way to persuade them they r wrong...or not?

[Clifton Santiago]

I don't think there is any persuading that guy. His argument is supposedly based on ILM's constraints of the EXR format. I think he is totally wrong, but regardless he has no interest in accomodating how we want to use the EXR format, nor the imagination to conceive of how it could be used. And all this in spite of the fact that other programs are interpreting EXR files the way we want.

[instinct]

Well i wonder whom he means by "the ppl that wrote EXR". For one it is STILL beeing written in opensource. I could find a bunch of his posts in the mailing list but NONE regarding that issue. And the file spec does NOT imply anything you are supposed to do to the data. And putting the alpha in the hidden transperancy channel of PS certainly is INTERPRETING the data not reading it as it's supposed to be read.

One more reason to hate PS...sigh as if there werent enough already.

Regards,
Thorsten

[dlparisi]

Just to double check myself... Am I really that off on what I said on my post over at adobe:

My Post:

Ditto to what progress and jonah have said...openEXR simply does not work in it's current implementation in CS3 (& CS4) for most workflows. I've read through the EXR description on ILM's site and I don't see anywhere that it requires the RGB to be made transparent due to the alpha. Yes, they do describe the pixel as being transparent, but this is in relation to performing any compositing actions, not opening it for editing.

And Chris Cox's response:

David - you're so unclear on the concepts I don't even know where to start.
That entire post is a non-starter.

I really don't understand why he has such a hard time understanding just why we're so upset and why it's not working for us.

[Clifton Santiago]

Don't get too worked up. That guy is an a$$clown.

[andrewjohn81]

this issue really bothers me too, especially that "a$$clown" of an engineer. Some engineers just have some major communication problems. He must be one of them. We actually have engineers in the design department here pretty much solely for the purpose of communicating the designs to other engineers so it doesn't get misinterpreted. Apparently when you say, a 2mm radius to one person, it means something completely different? lol

I could see why it's nice to have it read automatically as transparent. Sure....but not Nearly as often for most of us as we would want it to just read the alpha as an alpha.

I'd render to png instead of tiff for print as well if it didn't read those incorrectly as well. They are so much smaller and you can't notice the quality difference (unless I did my test wrong). I saved the same rendering in a bunch of different formats and compared them to an uncompressed tiff. i put the copy on a layer on top of the tiff and used difference. Then I put a layer adjustment on top of that and clamped the color to only black or white. I used a med. compressed jpeg just to make sure it worked out. That thing was all spotty all Over the place. A few formats had a few little specks here and there, but some of them surprised me that there were absolutely no differences while the file sizes where amazingly different.
Someone will have to let me know if it's a faulty test.

And I can't get that "hold alt while dragging into photoshop" trick to work. I tried some other key combos too, but with no luck. So sad....