I’m wondering what method of processing exr files allows for the most freedom, flexibillity and convenience. I am currently using Photoshop with OpenEXR and the HDR Tonemapping feature, but I found it a bit unintuitive and imprecise. Is there a better way to approach this?
Ideally I would love to have the same type of workflow that you have with raw photographs in Lightroom and the like or something like the color grading tools in DaVinci Resolve.
What is your end goal, what are you flowing your work for? Workflow does not start from software, it starts from what you need and want to do. Do you want to work with still images for print? Animations for cinema?
Well, I don’t really need it, but it could just be easier I think. It’s about convenience, not necessity.
It’s not really that important for many cases, but for example let’s say you have an image that is very contrasty and has some very bright areas, as well as dark areas and a very apparent gradient in between.
Now, in order not to over- or underexpose, I might use filmic or log and then adjust the exposure and gamma. But I find it hard to adjust the paramerers to do exactly what I want, which is turn down the highlights, turn up (or down) the shadows and keep the mid range just as it is (there will usually be areas in between that are too dark or too bright). If I had the tools of camera raw, I would use the two designated sliders (shadows and highlights) to do the adjustments without messing with the mid range.
But let’s say I use log or filmic and it gives me a very low contrast, but without clipping. Now, if I export it with 16 bit color depth, I might run into trouble with banding later on, because the contrast is so low in the mid range.
If you want to grade, resolve would indeed be one option, it works with exrs nicely. I’d suggest studying about color management and concepts, it will make your life a lot easier in the long run.
16bit integer store (tiff etc) is plenty, you are unlikely to run into banding issues. But I’d personally use half float exrs and external filmic ocio conf, which is not applicable in resolve though, because it does not allow loading external ocio config files.