Hi! I have a strange problem. I’m exporting a multilayered EXR from Blender to edit passes in Photoshop. Blender render has initially a nice color gamut. But when I’m opening it in PS the colors are overexposed and can’t be used and corrected properly.
And I’ve found a strange bug: if I just apply a Camera Raw filter on overexposed flattened layer the color management gets correctly somehow.
It’s cool but but I need this to be on layer stack of passes to correct them separately.
I’ve attached all settings screenshots. How can I open exr file from Blender in Photoshop with correct color?
exr export from blender is the pure unbounded render data, without the view transform (standard, guard rail, filmic, agx, …). I’m not 100% sure, but I assume the raw filter in photoshop is also a transform.
You should search the web if there is a way to use ocio configs (which is what blender relies on to supply you with the view transforms mentioned above) in photoshop. That way you can use the same config in Blender and in Photoshop.
You can “postprocess” EXRs in any photo editing software. All you have to do is find out if your software supports ocio or another way to apply a view transform. In Affinity Photo, for example, James Ritson provided macros for filmic and agx. Affinity Photo also supports OCIO so there’s two ways.
I don’t quite know what type of post processing you want to do so I can’t tell you exactly how to do it.
In most cases my postprocess is a separate editing of passes within a single multilayered file (for example Curve correction of glossy or diffuse layer). May be in such case I should just export single passes but for me exr is a common workflow for editing in After Effects for example. I’ll check if there are some decisions for Photoshop as well. I know that there’s a OpenOCIO Plugin for PS, need to check it.
Still Camera Raw behavior is quite curious, I can’t understand why it works in such way, but can’t find any information about it.
Afaik photoshop’s camera raw filter is to raw file what filmic or agx is to a cycles exr file. Render data (exr) and camera data (raw) have infinitely high values. They represent light intensity in three colors. But to make them make sense to our eyes, so basically to make them displayable on a monitor, we need to move those values to the 0…1 range. That moving is called a view transform. You’ll likely notice that if you use photoshop’s raw filter vs filmic, they produce different results. Similar enough to the untrained eye, but nonetheless different.
Never quite wrapped my head around color management properly, but I use this workflow sometimes when I just want to get the look from filmic/blender in photoshop to do some final adjustments. I usualy just do the combined pass, but should work on others too i guess, if you use exposiure or other “corrections” in blender it might not come over with the exr by default though. Probably not the correct way to do thing, but for some minor adjustments in PS it works for me;
A bit old this video so some things I think might come with or is avalable in photoshop as plug-ins by default but not sure … oh, and you don¨t need to edit the config file from never blender versions.
Not sure if this is what you are looking for but hope it helps
Yes, thank you! I’ve seen this video but it also uses the combined layer. I think there’s no way to use multilayered exr in Photoshop properly. Will use After Effects and will check Affinity.
