Cryptomatte image editing in Photoshop: Free Exr-IO 2 released

[igorposavec]

Hi,

 

i just wanted to update the last discussion about Exr and Photoshop compositing of 3d renderings. The new Version of Exr-IO comes now with Cryptomatte support and this should both redefine the workflow as well as speed it up.

I hope it can help you in your everyday creative work and job

 

Exr-IO 2.00 https://www.exr-io.com/exr-io-2-00/

 

3d-io has released the Exr-IO 2.00, the free OpenEXR plug-in for Adobe Photoshop.

 

 

The new version of the popular Exr-IO file format plug-in includes support for additional features like cryptomatte decoding, support for mipmaps and ripmaps, reduced memory consumption and numerous quality, compatibility and stability improvements with better error handling.

 

Exr-IO 2.00 aims to be as feature complete as possible to allow users to read and write the full scope of EXR image data wherever possible.

 

https://www.exr-io.com/exr-io-2-00/

 

enjoy!

[Tom Bussey]

I stumbled across this the other day, and it looks awesome. It seemed very slow opening the file with cryptomatte to masks enabled, to the point that I had to revert back to V1, might have been my file though. Would it be significantly slower if there's many different cryptomatte masks to separate out?

[Morne Erasmus]

like anything, the higher res and the more layers, the bigger the file size, the slower it will open, regardless of this plugin.

 

 

The plugin is pretty awesome though

[igorposavec]

I stumbled across this the other day, and it looks awesome. It seemed very slow opening the file with cryptomatte to masks enabled, to the point that I had to revert back to V1, might have been my file though. Would it be significantly slower if there's many different cryptomatte masks to separate out?

 

Hello Tom

 

thank you for your feedback.

It seems i do not understand the workflow: you want to open file with crytomatte and it opens slower (what is logical, since many extra layers need to be rendered in PS). And because it is slower, you switch to V1, which can not load Cryptomatte layers at all (which is faster, because there is no support in V1 for Crytomatte). But you can not then open Crytpomatte info with V1. What did i misunderstand?

 

Why do not open a file with Crytomatte toggle checker OFF? In this case, Cryptomatte wont be included in the loading process?

 

Second and your correct observation:

V2 has indeed a different loader procedure then the V1 - we have had two years time to discuss the features with thousands of cg studios and best artists: they main problem was the memory consumption. Therefore we have rewritten the core so one can load gigantic data without crashing computer by compensating it through optimizing memory segments. This causes some slow down in some cases, but it guarantees the image loading.

The studios told us they do not give a damn about time (5 seconds or 7 seconds, 40 seconds or 46 seconds) when they can not load the image because there is no enough memory to read and write it as EXR. There is a case in my video-presentation where i load 4 GB file with 30 layers in V2 in 35 seconds. It is mainly slowed down by the speed of my SSD. The 5 seconds lost are... irrelevant. The advantage was i was able to load it in 32GB Ram machine, which did not work well with V1.

 

So, long explanation for a simple sentence: maybe turning off Crytomatte, if you do not need it, can help you.

Finally, Exr-IO V1 is obsolete, but still a great piece of software even now in 2019.

 

ps. One more thing: if you drop EXR from Vray, Arnold etc with Cryptomatte-Node, unsorted, unclassified, where each grass blade get one layer, it will generate huge amount of unnecessary layers. Photoshop has the limitation of 8000 layers. My opinion is, although i get sometimes Matte-plates from Hollywood guys with 100+ layers, that one can not work reasonably in PS with 300+ layers. If you have 1000 layers, you did something wrong. From that point on it is a mess.

You do not need for each object a mask. Organize them in layers or user-properties: Vray has such a beautiful options for a disciplined workflow, it is amazing to see that even the most complex scene can have at the end only 30 entities

 

thanks

best regards

[Tom Bussey]

Yeah I just did without the Cryptomatte in the end. It was a while ago so I can't remember if I tried to open it without. I think I did it by layer or material, something vaguely logical, defo not by object. I'll give it another go soon and report back. Was just against a deadline at the time and needed something I knew would work.

[mdsony]

Yes, the plugin was really cool.