OpenEXR


Home
About OpenEXR
OpenEXR samples
Using exrdisplay
Documentation Photoshop Plugin -
Downloads
License
Related links
Mailing lists

OpenEXR Documentation

OpenEXR for Adobe Photoshop
This document describes how to use the "EXRFormat" plug-in to read and write OpenEXR images using Adobe Photoshop.

Supported Operating Systems

This plug-in has only been tested on MacOS 9.2.2, Mac OS X 10.2.4, and Windows 2000. It should work on MacOS 8.1 and higher, and Windows 98 and higher, but this has not been verified.

Supported Host Applications

This plug-in has only been tested with Adobe Photoshop 7.0. It should work with Photoshop 5.5 and higher, but this has not been verified. This plug-in will not work with versions of Photoshop earlier than 5.5.

This plug-in will not work correctly with other applications which support some Photoshop file format plug-ins, such as combustion from Discreet, or Commotion from Pinnacle Systems.

This plug-in will also not work correctly with Adobe After Effects. An After Effects-specific plug-in may be included in a future release of OpenEXR.

Installation

To install the plug-in, copy it to your Photoshop plug-ins folder. If Photoshop is running, you will have to quit it and launch it again. Here is a typical Macintosh installation:

You could also place the EXRFormat plug-in in the "File Formats" folder, or in any folder inside the "Plug-Ins" folder.

Opening an OpenEXR image

Once you have installed the plug-in, you will be able to open images in the OpenEXR format. Select "Open..." from Photoshop's File menu:

and navigate to a folder containing OpenEXR images. This example uses the images distributed with the OpenEXR source code release.

Note that when you select an OpenEXR image, the "Format:" menu in the Open dialog reads "OpenEXR". This lets you know that the plug-in is installed correctly, and that Photoshop has detected that the file is in the OpenEXR format.

When you click Open in the Open dialog, you will see a new dialog which allows you to specify how the image is interpreted in Photoshop.

This dialog is necessary because an OpenEXR image can contain many more colors than you can work with in Photoshop, even in Photoshop's "16 Bits/Channel" mode. OpenEXR uses floating-point (real number) pixels, and supports a high dynamic range of pixel values - that is, colors which are brighter than white. Photoshop uses integer (whole number) pixels, and does not support colors brighter than white. Because of this, not all of the pixels in the OpenEXR image will be preserved when the image is loaded into Photoshop. This dialog lets you control which pixels are preserved, so that you can work with the image in Photoshop with a minimal loss of quality.

Here is a quick explanation of what these controls do:

Exposure: this controls the apparent exposure of the image. An exposure of 0 (the default) will apply no change to the image. An exposure of 1 will make the image twice as bright, revealing more detail in the low end. An exposure of -1 will make the image twice as dark, revealing highlights that may have been clipped at higher exposures.

Gamma: this controls the gamma correction that is applied to the image. Most images, such as JPEGs or TIFFs, are stored with an implicit gamma encoding of 2.2, the standard for video images. OpenEXR images are stored with no gamma correction. By default, the EXRFormat plug-in applies a gamma correction of 2.2 to the image as it is read into Photoshop, so that it will match the color space of other images, and display correctly on a computer monitor. If you do not need to color-match the EXR image with an image in another, gamma-corrected format, you might find other gamma values more visually appealing. For example, most Macintosh monitors have a display gamma of 1.8, not 2.2. (Microsoft Windows computers generally have a display gamma of 2.2).

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.

The dialog also contains a preview area, which lets you see the effect your settings will have on the image. Click in the black area of the dialog to load the preview:

In this preview, we can see that this image has a fairly broad dynamic range. Much of the image is too dark to see clearly, but the lamps are so bright that they have been clipped at the default settings. If we darken our exposure, however, we can see that the image does contain data for those bright areas. Setting the exposure to -2 makes the image four times darker - the pixels that now appear white are actually four times brighter than "white".

We could reduce the exposure even further, and reveal more detail in the highlights, but we would start to lose detail in the dark areas. If we click "OK" at this point, the image will be opened in Photoshop at an exposure of -2, and will appear very dark (as we saw in the preview):

It appears that we have lost a large amount of detail in the image, but there is actually much more detail here than can be displayed on your computer screen. Checking the "Image->Mode" menu in Photoshop reveals that this image is 16 bits per channel, and a computer monitor can only display 8 bits of information per channel.

To see the hidden detail, we can use the preview feature of Photoshop's Levels command:

This will create a dialog that will show us the histogram of the image. Note that there is a large gap between the brightest pixels (the blown-out highlights) and the majority of the colors in the image.

If we adjust the white point so that the majority of the pixels define the full range of the image, the highlights will be blown out, but more low-end detail will be revealed.

Note that if you click OK in the Levels dialog, the range adjustment will be applied to the actual image, and all of the overrange pixel values will be clipped to white. When working with OpenEXR image in Photoshop, It's important to be careful that the details you care about are preserved.

Also, note that when working on a 16 bit image in Photoshop, many features such as painting and layers are unavailable. If you wish to use these tools, you must convert the image to 8 bits per channel using the "Image->Mode" menu, which will result in an even greater loss of data. Cautious use of the exposure and gamma controls in the EXR Import dialog, along with applying the Levels command before converting to 8 bits, will help you use all of Photoshop's powerful tools while preserving the colors that are most important in your image. Of course, some images will simply contain too much data to be manipulated safely in Photoshop - it's up to you to ensure that the image you end up with is correct and visually appealing.

Saving an OpenEXR image

Saving an OpenEXR image is similar to opening one. When you choose to save an image in OpenEXR format, a dialog will appear, allowing you to specify how the image should be saved. Many of these settings are similar to the controls provided by the Import dialog.

Note that the Exposure and Gamma settings mean something different in this dialog - they specify the settings that currently apply to the image. For example, when the image opened in the previous example is saved, this dialog states that the image has been gamma corrected and darkened. The plug-in will undo both of these settings before saving the OpenEXR file. This means that if you use the same settings when you save an OpenEXR image as when you opened it, the color space of the image will stay the same. However, any colors which were lost when the image was opened (clipped highlights or crushed low-end values) will not be restored. If you are saving a new image, or an image originally in another format, as an OpenEXR image, the default settings will result in a valid image.

This dialog also allows you to specify the compression scheme used to save the OpenEXR image. The OpenEXR format supports several methods of compression, all of them lossless.

© OpenEXR, Industrial Light & Magic and ILM are trademarks and service marks of Lucasfilm Ltd.; all associated intellectual property is protected by the laws of the United States and other countries. All rights reserved.