Photoshop files (with or without layers) have worked fine for me in blender on the two systems I use for work. I’ve used them as texture maps (and even viewport background images, if I remember correctly) in pretty much every project.
But two other systems I’ve recently set up as rendering stations will not recognize .psd files! All of the systems are running the same OS (XP), same version of blender (2.41) and same version of python (2.4). My scripts folder and default scene file are copied to each blender install, as well. Except for hardware, these systems are very similar.
On these two ‘new’ systems .psd files will not render or show up in the material/texture preview panels, and the console simply says “unknown file format.”
Hm, I had something similar some time ago. Blender worked fine for months using psd-files. Then from to day to another it stoped accepting them without obvious reason. I never figured out why. I was lucky to get around this problem restoring XP with a backup image. Everything fine from then on.
On one of the problem systems: not sure; On the other system: I don’t think so.
Seems odd that this would have anything to do with it . . . but now that you mention it, I think I remember reading something a while ago about a ‘quicktime/file format’ issue like that.
Is this the most likely cause? Well, I’ll install it to see if that fixes the problem. But in the meantime I’ve just switched to using .png files (that’s the format that I already render to anyway).
On the topic of different file formats, what are the pros & cons of the various options available (generally, like for rendering . . . and specifically for use as textures)?
:o .Psd files had never worked on my PC. I also got a Win XP. If you find out the solution Cire, please post it. And tell me does blender recognise the transparent .psd images i.e. the alpha value.
Quicktime is used by Blender for lots of formats. You can export directly from Blender to H264 with Quicktime. I would imagine Blender uses Quicktime for psd support. I can’t think of any other library that would decode it. It might be a good idea to use flattened files for textures though, I would think layered psds would use more resources.
You should generally go for lossless compression (tiff, tga, png) as opposed to lossy like jpg, especially for textures. Rendering straight to a movie is possible but it’s better to render to images and then make a movie in some other software. Rendering to a movie is handy if you are in a hurry or are doing a test render.
I personally use lzw-compressed tiff for pretty much everything because Photoshop doesn’t like png for some reason. But I’d render from Blender to PNG because Blender doesn’t export to tiff for some reason (I maybe need libtiff installed).
yes, but the image is blended with white… so if you’re not looking at the alpha channels your transparent areas are white, and semi-transparent areas are brightened [which is annoying… particularly when you’re using the alpha channel]
Thanks for all the input everyone. I haven’t yet tested the quicktime fix, but I’ll probably just stop using .psd files as textures altogether . . . there doesn’t seem to be any particular benefit.
And yet there seem to be a number of drawbacks: the lack of consistent support; the alpha issues mentioned by z3r0 d; and the resource-hog that layered files may be, as pointed out by osxrules (I don’t use flattened .psds because their color or saturation is altered for some reason).
Zazu: I’ll post back here if & when i find out what caused this. In the meantime, try installing quicktime and see what happens.
Thanks again for all the help!
BTW: osxrules . . . what did you mean by “Photoshop doesn’t like png”?
What about that openEXR format that seems to be already avavailible in recent CVS versions? It looks like it has everything: alpha, high range (like HDRI) and layers… That seems to me the perfect, ideal file format… last Photoshop versions even recognize it… Anyone uses it already?
I wonder if that’s to do with blending modes. You can specify blending modes for layers.
When I tried saving as PNG, it took ages. It also didn’t save the alpha channel properly. I was told that was due to a bug in the version I was using but I’m sure it still had problems after updating. I haven’t used PNG recently so maybe it works ok now but tiff can store 8, 16 and 32-bit values, alpha as well as arbitrary layers.
I know it is an age-old thread, but it came up on google, so just in case (it might spare someone out there a few minutes of scratching their head):
I had a similar problem with *.psd. The weird thing was: a certain PSD worked, but at some point it just didn’t work any more. From one moment to the other: bam, pink, image could not be found any more (at least blender claimed that was the case).
Tracking the issue down I found that the reason was a feathered layer mask in Photoshop. It was explicitly the feature where you can feather a layermask interactively. Recreating the same effect with a selection that was blurred around the edges worked and turning this selection into a new layer-mask worked without a problem! (Applies to: Blender 2.79, Photoshop CC19.1.3)