Blender to Affinity Photo 32 bit exr Color Management Transfer?

[johncena]

I'm having a problem with affinity photo not transferring exr files rendered in blender with the color transform chosen inside blender. I remember this having worked in the past, so I don't know wether I accidentally changed anything.

I rendered an image in blender with a filmic color transform and saved it as a 32 bit exr. Here is what it looks like in blender with the color management settings.

And here is what it looks like upon opening the file in affinity photo. (Side-by-side closeup). The highlights are over-exposed and it looks like the srgb color transform in blender.

So I tried using an opencolorio transform in affinity photo, however I am unable to select any color profiles and the transform option in the 32 bit preview window in greyed out, despite having selected a opencolorio configuration file in the settings.

[James Ritson]

Hi @johncena, there are a couple of things to break down in this reply:

Firstly, regarding your OCIO configuration not working, which configuration are you using? If you've just copied the blender OCIO configuration from the blender directory, maybe try putting it somewhere that doesn't require elevated privileges (e.g. Documents folder or somewhere other than Program Files).

Regarding the actual filmic transform, there's a little caveat you need to be aware of with blender's OCIO configuration. When the configuration is successfully loaded and you open an EXR file, the 32-bit Preview Panel will actually use "None" as the initial device transform, which gives you an unmanaged linear light view. If you intend to edit your document and export back to EXR, you'll want to switch this over to sRGB and choose Filmic as the view transform. This whole process is non-destructive and only applied to the view, though—the colour values in your document are not altered.

If Affinity Photo is your final destination and you intend to export to a non-linear format (e.g. JPEG/TIFF/PNG), I'd recommend switching over to ICC Display Transform instead, which will apply a non-linear view transform based on the document's colour profile. This will then ensure parity with how the exported image will look. At this point, however, everything will look too bright and washed out compared to blender's view. You'll need to add an OCIO adjustment layer going from scene linear (usually just "Linear") to Filmic sRGB. Then you'll need to add a second OCIO adjustment layer going from sRGB to Linear. A bit strange, I know, but essentially your document is still in a linear colour space—there's just a non-linear view transform being applied when it's presented to screen. If you're unsure, I did a tutorial on this here: 

 

 

Hope the above helps!

[johncena]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I actually figured out the error a few days later - the ocio configuration file needs to be placed in the same folder with the different files for the color spaces, which I wasn't aware of. Once I placed the file in the folder and selected it in the user preferences, it worked as expected.

[Strandbummler]

Maybe someone can explain to me, how can i convert a 32bit exr to 8bit and keep the colors intact. When just change the color profile all colors are washed out completely and i can't figure out what i have to do to fix this.

Thanks in advance.