My scene has a particle system that I’ve added a few nodes to in the compositor, as seen in the bottom most panel of this image. That’s the render from Blender directly. However, when I save that image out as a PNG or EXR, regardless of bit-depth, importing it into another program, in this case After Effects or Photoshop, what I get is basically nothing. The top left image is the regular view of the image - it’s black/fully transparent (if I click the toggle). On the top right is the RGB Straight view, which shows that there is, in fact, data being saved into the image, but the alpha levels have to be cranked to the extreme to see them.
I’ve tried lots of different factors, including just outputting the raw layer without the additional nodes as well as disabling the compositor entirely.
Can someone help me understand why I don’t just get what I see from Blender in whatever other program? I’ve set the output to RGBA 16bit color depth PNG (or OpenEXR) and color management is sRGB Display Device with a Filmic View Transform (I’ve also tried Standard).
I’m not an expert, but I’ve had similar kind of problem when rendering smoke puffs, in Blender it looks good but in Davinci Resolve almost nothing can be seen… I think it’s just that when looking at it in Blender with transparent background it won’t look the same as it would when comped onto another image. Maybe you should use some background image for it already inside Blender compositor, just to first adjust the level of transparency, then you could leave it off from the final render. Also one way to brute force your already rendered image to become more visible is to open it in photoshop and just duplicate the layer so many times that they start to add up and be less transparent, and then export it as a new image with alpha. (You can ofc also do it in Blender compositor)
There’s something odd about the way Blender encodes the alpha on export. For example, if I add an Alpha Convert node to the compositor and set it to premultiplied, I suddenly see what After Effects is seeing: tiny, barely there specs of alpha unless I cranked the curves.
Forgive the invocation, but I’d like to call upon the Alpha Benders - @Gez , @aliasguru and @troy_s based on a years old conversation I found that sorta relates. Are you guys still around, fighting the silent killers that are alpha channels? I’ve attached my project.
Pollen_001.blend1 (1.9 MB)
Quick addendum - It’s almost certainly an Adobe issue, as importing my EXRs into Nuke produces no such issue.
