10-bit (or more) color with Studio
wsgentry
Posts: 572
Tonight, I was thinking about some what if's. During that session, I found out that NVidia cards support 10-bit color and in a document from Nvidia, I found IRay supports 10-bit color, but not to what extent.
So, my question is: Has anyone tried 10-bit color renders with Studio and is it even possible?
Scott
Comments
If you use canvases, the output files are EXR format, which is an High Dynamic Range (HDR) format using 16-bit floating point values for color and exposure. Basically even if you just use a Beauty canvas, the output there has more color and intensity data than the standard PNG output from the rendering process. You may need a 3rd party tool to read and process them though. I use GIMP for post processing, but even then I needed to get some extensions to support EXR files.
Thanks answering. I'm gathering you save your renders to bmp or a lossless format then use a third-party application to convert the render to EXR format? Also, I'm going to guess that direct rendering is not really possible in Daz, now or in the future. Granted it's a stretch because most folks don't have monitors supporting ten or more bit color unless they have a 4k HDR10 or Dolby supported TV. It's more of a what if question, I guess.
I will try as you say and see what the results are.
Look under your render settings tab->advanced settings you will see a check box for "canvases" . If you render using Canvases, all canvas layers are rendered in 16bit fp exr, even if you just do a beauty pass and do not composite( which can also be done from within Daz Studio).
Thank you for that!
Scottt
Did the first canvas render overnight. I got a Photoshop plugin (I have Gimp, too), watched the SickleYield video, so we'll see how it goes. It's a full 4k render so I'm interested in seeing color depth, but didn't have time this morning.
Thank you guys, again.
Interesting stuff. After looking at every video on YouTube for canvases,having Gimp crash when loading the second EXR file, using Photoshop and the Exr-IO plugin and trying just about everything (32-bit to 8-bit, Adjustment layers--exposure, etc.,) I'm frustrated as all get out, but plugging away. DAZ works fine producing the EXR files. So, I'll ask for hints elsewhere. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
Scott
@wsgentry - do you mind sharing what you discovered for viewing the EXR files. I found out that with the Gimp plugin, it will convert the files to Targa, followed by making them 8 bit. I have tried Adobe AE, followed by applying an exposure filter, then entering "-12" which gives me a file that resembles the accompanying tif files, but once again, when I render to tif, then I no longer have an HDR file.
Please help, this is driving me nuts with all these dead ends