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.

Regardless, can you just add a tickbox option somewhere to allow photoshop to open OpenEXR's as RGBA rather than a transparent RGB?

Whatever Chris. I'm not an engineer/programmer but I don't see why you still can't have an option when opening exr's to open them using the CS2 convention of RGBA rather than transparent RGB. Is it that hard?

Chris,

I second everything progress, jonah and David Parisi are saying.

How can discarding the A channel possibly be the correct way of opening an EXR file? And if discarding the A channel is correct according to ILM, then AE, Combustion, Nuke, Fusion are all wrong?

And in a file format that allows one to save multiple channels as described by David Parisi, how does discarding the A channel make any sense? If the proEXR plugin allows one to access multiple additional channels, including the alpha channel, are the proEXR guys doing it wrong as well?

AE has now adopted portions of the proEXR plugin which allow access to additional channels in the EXR format. Why would Photoshop refuse to accomodate such added functionality? What if Photoshop adds multiple channel access in future releases? Will they still discard the alpha channel?

WOW. Too many hours a day coding Chris? Not enough sleep? Right about the time that Guido Quaroni from !!!!PIXAR!!!! chimed in, I would start listening buddy!

If I were on the phone to tech support, this is the point in the conversation where I would ask to speak to the manager! :D

Joking, joking.

I have read all of this discussion. I understand the math: color * opacity. But many other apps give you the option to ignore the Alpha thus keeping the RGB.

I've made an EXR in 3ds Max http://www.jonahhawk.com/EXR/Alpha.exr

Ok, to help illustrate our point further, please open it in After Effects. Right click on the EXR footage and choose Interpret Footage. Choose Ignore under Alpha Channel. Viola! the RGB data is intact!

If this doesn't help you understand where we are coming from maybe you could have someone else discuss the issue with us. I can tell you are getting frustrated.

Ah, so you did open that EXR in AE then? why is the rgb still there in AE?

So the few people who...

"have already started OpenEXR down the road to ruin by either not understanding the file format (or even the terms involved), or trying to make it do things it is not intended to do"

include the developers of After Effects, Nuke, Fusion, etc...Photoshop is now the anomaly in our workflow.

Targa and tiff files work this way but neither of these will store extra channels like Z depth, Velocity, Object ID etc. This is why we love EXR.

I really don't understand why you won't admit that having the option is better than not having it. Let us wallow in file format blasphemy if we so choose!!

Have you done any compositing work yourself? Have you tried opening the EXR file I posted in After Effects and seen what happens when you choose ignore alpha?

Chris,
>I write the composting code

Had to laugh here. I assume you mean "compositing".

Neil

Chris, I can fix that typo, if you wish, but -- it IS good for a laugh, you must admit!

I used to do promotions work for one of the major sports publications. Can't tell you how often I came close to inserting an extra "e" in "Super Bow_l" -- and that @#$% spell checker would have just sat there, clueless!

Neil

Ill agree with those here in the industry who are asking for this functionality. We need options, albeit with the reasonable defaults Chris is talking about.

We use unpremultiplied imagery like this often in certain circumstances, and we know we are not the only ones. Nuke and Shake and Fusion all do not force you to be premultiplied or unpremultiplied, making you have to handle all this yourself. Being able to be smart about how we make our file import interpretations allows flexibility. If you want to paint a mattepainting for reprojection onto cg, you may want to start with the painting first, and then start to hack away(make transparent in the final render) parts while you go through the iterative development process. If you eat in too much by painting black on the alpha and you have saved it, you want the ability to go back and "undelete" that area. The alternative now is to have a psd master file with a layer mask, and then bake down an rgba version every time you make an edit, this adds an additional file and management to something which could be simplified by adding this import/saving behavior option. If AE has it why can't photoshop have it?

Even tho I have the feeling that this discussion won't get to any conclusion, I have to say that I find that the way PS is dealing with EXR Alpha channels is just plain wrong.

Baking the contents of the Alpha channel into the RGB transparency makes it impossible to work with un-premultiplied RGBA images, especially output them from PS.

If you render a TIFF with RGBA channels and you open it in PS you get a "Background" and "Alpha 1", both untouched as it should be since I can add (or not) the transparency to the RGB channels at any point in PS as I please. This is the right way since PS isn't guessing if my RGB channels are pre-multiplied or not, nor if I need transparency or not. It leaves that decision to me, which is a smart thing to do since I'm the one who can judge what I'm seeing and what are my exact needs.

But if you render the very same file in EXR format with the very same set of channels of the TIFF (RGBA), when you open it in PS you get "Layer 0" and no Alpha channel.

This is just plain wrong since PS is assuming that the RGB was premultiplied by A, and that the RGB transparency is required (desired) by the user. Something that it shouldn't do no matter what the files specs say or don't say. That's an action that should be taken by the user since as far as I know computers don't actually have a visual awareness of the images they are processing nor are aware of the context where they will be used.

Alpha which as far as I know is usually used as a RGB matte channel is indeed intended to be a "transparency channel" but that doesn't mean that a application (PS in this case) has the right to trash my RGB data just because it "makes sense".

Photoshop as image editing (retouching app) should keep it's premise of being able to open - edit - and output an image with no data being lost or being drastically changed from input to output, period.

Being able to retain data as it is throughout the process is a must and a basic necessity in any digital workflow that I know of.

cheers,
dg

Chris-

there is a reason AE added an "interpret as linear light" option. Those scoundrels in the AE team actually listened to the testers and, while it's unconventional to represent exr rgb data as gamma encoded, it does happen. If users want it, it might be worth considering.

gary

This is seemingly a dead end, in terms of working with this particular representative. Is there another Adobe representative that can weigh in on this topic?

These "people" you are so flippantly addressing, are industry professionals who have spent the last 2 decades or so up in the small hours of the morning writing elaborate scripts or awkwardly contorting already strained pipelines to decieve Photoshop into reluctantly relinquishing relivant images, so you can casually claim your product was used on [insert film here].

Adobe Photoshop Engineers would be wise to listen to their user base, especially when they have so patiently explained the situation. And rest assured, as gut wrenchingly painful as it is to read this mindlessly repetative thread; we have.

consider this fromt he open exr documentation ( http://www.openexr.com/photoshop_plugin.html )
"Un-Premultiply: by convention, OpenEXR images are "premultiplied" - the color channel values are already matted against black using the alpha channel. In Photoshop, it's more convenient to work with unmatted images. It's important to use this option rather than un-premultiplying the image within Photoshop, because the plug-in will un-premultiply before applying exposure and gamma correction.
This option will have no affect if your image does not contain an alpha channel."

by convention OPENEXR images are premultiplied, sure, by convention, you shouldnt wear white socks with sandals, but that wont stop vfx folk from doing it!

Point being, this is not an unreasonable request, it is entirely trivial to impliment, and noone has been anything but patient when requesting it.

would you kindly reconsider.
_sam