Render Save format...

[N-drju]

Anyways, kids love to draw contemporary .bmp art in Paint.

[archonforest]

There u go...
BMP will live forever

[Oshyan]

Of course EXR is not as widely supported as even BMP (it is also much, much newer), but EXR is not the format I would recommend instead of BMP. TIF has the same advantages as BMP, plus more, including compression, support of higher bit depth, etc. Many programs do support BMP, but less than TIF, and indeed saving to BMP is less well supported, which is an important factor.

- Oshyan

[N-drju]

Hm, that's strange...

I've just completed a render (gonna post it later) and saved it in .tif, later .png and finally, just a thought, I saved it in open EXR.

To my surprise my default image viewer on Mac was able to open it. However the render looked very strange as it was unnaturally bright. This was a night scene so that shouldn't be. Do you know why is that Oshyan?

[Oshyan]

Yes, it's because EXR has much higher dynamic range, it includes more data between dark and light, in fact it's a wider range of brightness data than your monitor can display. So there are basically 2 choices an image viewer has when it displays an image with this much dynamic range: it can "clip" the high and/or low brightness values to white/black, respectively, or it can try to remap the values of high and low to some kind of "average" or a "curve" that will let all the values fit within the display's capabilities. The problem with the latter approach is it can often unnaturally skew the brightness. I would guess that is what's happening in your case, or something similar. Anyway, it's a near certainty that it is somehow due to the higher dynamic range of EXR files.

- Oshyan

[jo]

Hi,

OpenEXR support is built into OS X. Anything which uses the OS provided image services can open them. It's been that way for a long while.

I have a feeling that the EXRs look different when opened in other apps because they don't have the tone mapping TG normally applies when converting its internal HDR colour to 8 bit colour and display on the screen. I'm not 100% sure about that though.

Regards,

Jo