Request: openEXR and HDR image viewer plugins

[artstorm]

Hey guys!

With the increasing popularity of the image formats openEXR and HDR I'd love (and I guess among all other Digital Content Creators) to be able to browse through my tons of images in these formats without having to resort to Adobe Bridge or any of the other image browsers that supports these formats.

As the usage of these formats grows by the day, now when the Adobe suite supports them fully, all 3D applications and many 2D and video applications as well as even some new cameras, it would be really great to be able to browse them in DOpus.

To have basic thumbnail browsing and maybe also viewing of the images within DOpus would be awesome! But thumbnail browsing alone would go a long way.

So I just wanted to check and hope some of you plugin developers might be interested in creating viewers for these amazing and useful image formats?

The specifications and sources for both formats are publically available, so my non-programming brain guesses it's a matter of adapting it into the DOpus SDK structure?

Here is some links.
EXR:
http://www.openexr.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEXR
File Format Documentation:
http://www.openexr.com/documentation.html

HDR:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging
http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/dataformats/pic/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiance_% ... age_format
File Format Documentation (p28-39) - There is tons of more examples out there:
http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/refer/filefmts.pdf

I use both these image formats on a daily basis, so if someone is interested to develop these plugins for DOpus, feel free to shot me any questions about them, or if you need any other assistance in form of testing and so on.

/Johan

[Lothar]

add big big vote for that as well - what a petty that there hasn´t been an answer from the developers yet if someone considers working on that yet ...

best regards
Lothar

[spot]

i second this, too. i'd love to see these format supported!

[Cageman]

Hey guys!

With the increasing popularity of the image formats openEXR and HDR I'd love (and I guess among all other Digital Content Creators) to be able to browse through my tons of images in these formats without having to resort to Adobe Bridge or any of the other image browsers that supports these formats.

/Johan

Quoted for 100% agreement...

Ohh... and nice to see you here!

Cheers!

[egz]

I have to second this as well. The lack of support (thumbnails and in the viewer) for two of the most used file formats in the CG industry is quickly becoming a big limitation in DOpus. EXR and HDR are quickly replacing TGA, TIFF and PNG in production pipelines all over the place. These days we almost exclusively render to .exr format, and use .hdr for lighting in almost all our 3D graphics projects.

[leo]

Out of interest, which file/image management tools do support those formats?

If people really want them in Opus you could try setting up a bounty to get a programmer to write a plugin. Writing Opus viewer plugins is very easy for formats which decode into a bitmap. I'd write one myself but I've got a lot else on my list to do first.

[mattgorner]

Out of interest, which file/image management tools do support those formats?

Photoshop and whole host of tone mapping (Photomatix / Artisan etc.) applications.

But just wanted to add my vote to this, I have a load of these files for use with LightWave and modo.

At the moment have to resort to creating JPG versions of them all so I can preview those, then select the actual HDR file.

[raptor|3D]

One more vote from me .

[artstorm]

Out of interest, which file/image management tools do support those formats?

And also Adobe Bridge has support for these formats, which is what I use at the moment to browse fp images.

There's light on the horizon though, one interesting product I came in contact with during my research for a effecient color managed workflow in 3D was the FastPictureViewer WIC RAW Codec Pack.
If you scroll down a bit on this page you'll find this:

Possible future formats
Without making any kind of commitment, we are investigating a few image formats for possible future inclusion in the FastPictureViewer WIC RAW Codec Pack. Formats currently under consideration includes Radiance's HDR and ILM's OpenEXR, two of the most popular formats in the Computer Graphics industry, along with DDS and PPM.

This is a codec pack that adds image formats as additional codecs to windows available to all applications that supports Windows Imaging Component. I don't know if DOpus uses WIC to display native image formats, but if it does (and I hope so) and the codec pack adds support for OpenEXR and HDR as they are thinking about the life with FP images on windows would be so much more joyful.
I'd suggest dropping the developer of the codec pack a line to let them know there's interest in adding OpenEXR and HDR support. It's a free pack, but they have a juicy donation coming from me if I'd get OpenEXR support in windows directly through it. Life would be so good!

[leo]

Opus doesn't use WIC yet but it would probably be fairly easy to write a WIC plugin. So far it hasn't looked that compelling as the main thing WIC seems to provide is Raw camera support, which Opus already has. (And people said, at least initially, that the Raw codecs for WIC were not that good. Maybe they are better now.)

OpenEXR itself looks pretty easy as well, though. Probably easier than adding WIC support.

I don't know when Opus 10 will be out but my plan is to write an OpenEXR plugin for Opus 10 if nobody else has written one by then. (Of course, I'm open to bribes for writing it sooner. Got a lot of other stuff to write as well, though...)

[artstorm]

Awesome! Leo, that's an excellent plan!
Thanks for the WIC info. And having OpenEXR directly within dopus without having to go through third party codecs would also be the best and most convenient option. A great addition for people within the CG field and using dopus = drool!
So, about those bribes?

[Cageman]

Yeah... what about those bribes?

[leo]