Cryptomatte

[Pixelatedvertex]

Hi, while I'm not on the beta, cryptomatte is a feature, I would really appreciate for postproduction of renderings. Would implementing this be possible?

For those who don't know this, it's a render output in exr format, that holds masks for all the objects/materials/special tags for the entire scene and is starting to become the standard for post-production in softwares like Nuke or Fusion, it's also become available for Photoshop users thanks to the EXR-IO plugin recently.

It would be great to have this in Affinity Photo as well.

Cheers,

Ivan

[Seabeer]

Making use of Cryptomatte in affinity would be fantastic. Also for affinity 2.0 the option of a node based workflow like in nuke / natron / fusion / blender would be a dream as well. Several render layers and Cryptomatte masks are a lot easier to handle with nodes. It's much more comfortable to itterate and compare looks, because one can simply add or disconnect a whole node tree. That way old work can be kept and always come back to, if one approach turns out to go the wrong direction. It's the main reason why I do most of my 3D compositing currently in blender.

Edited June 23, 2019 by Seabeer

[eobet]

I would also like cryptomatte support.

We're about to test a new open source cryptomatte plugin for Photoshop at work, so it can be done:

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

[MAffinity]

Exr-io does not seem to be recognized by Affinity Photo so far though .

 

Edit:

It seems that because Affinity Photo does not have an SDK its not possible to create complex import tools which go deep into image formats or data management.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/75194-affinity-designer-photo-sdk/

Edited August 8, 2019 by MAffinity
more information

[OdFori]

OMG!!!!

 

 

Thanks Serif!

[Pixelatedvertex]

This looks really nice at first, but I'm kind of getting the feeling, that this is more of an awkward workaround, than a real implementation of cryptomatte.

First of all, even after downloading the latest version, my cryptomatte passes don't get imported the same way they look in the tutorial and for some reason don't seem to allow me to do flood selections (probably because the values in the cryptomatte pass aren't really colors). My suspicion is, that before comp, they saved the cryptomatte, that is supposed to be an EXR to work properly, as a tiff or png or something from the vray frame buffer (so pretty much just a diagnostic view of the cryptomatte instead of the cryptomatte itself), to get the color info into affinity photo, discarding the data that makes the cryptomatte pass actually useful in the process. You can see at the file tab, that it's a 8-bit file, that could never hold the necessary amount of data for an actual cryptomatte layer to work. The workflow shown here looks more like using render ID passes, which I've seen some people do before cryptomatte became a thing, but's not the same. Please don't get me wrong, this can save you a lot of time setting up masks, but doesn't give you the functionality cryptomatte was supposed to give you.

The way cryptomatte is supposed to work, is, as far as I understand it, that you get a channel for every object/material/tag, that the cryptomatte pass is supposed to capture and you end up with a file, that basically contains an alpha mask for every unique tag in the scene. Sure, the files get huge, but you get really nice selections including antialiasing and sub-pixel details.

Kudos on the spare channels trick though. That is something I didn't know about and it looks super useful!

But back to the topic. There's two problems with the workflow presented here:

+one is, you're limited to 100 objects, that can be stored in the mask, if the Flood select tool slider works with 1% increments, which can be a problem in more complex scenes with 100+ tags, maybe even less, since the colors are assigned randomly and can be pretty close together at times

+the other, much bigger problem, in my opinion, is the selection borders. Since you're not really extracting cryptomatte data, but only doing a flood select on a flat color image, you don't get antialiasing working and you lose definition in areas with very fine detail, often in sub-pixel scales. You'll also probably get nasty selection borders with glowing edges or some kind of ghosting, if you try and do some kind of a more extreme adjustment.

Maybe I'm just clumsy, couldn't get it to work and am misunderstanding something, but I find this video a bit misleading to present it as working with cryptomattes.

 

Cheers,

Ivan

[eobet]

I thought the whole point of cryptomatte was to get perfect cut-outs, yet when I followed that video's instructions, I ended up with not only a black edge, but no anti-aliasing:

Also, building on what the previous poster said, there's a free OpenEXR plugin for Photoshop that supports Cryptomatte and the way they do it is to put each object mask in its own layer. Together with control click directly in the viewport, selection works pretty well with that method.

[Pixelatedvertex]

Hi eobet, thans for chiming in. As mentioned above, what is shown in the video is not actually the use of a cryptomatte pass, but rather a very crude method of using the diagnostic preview of the cryptomatte pass in the frame buffer of your renderer to do very crude selections and I find that quite off topic, or maybe just a lack of understanding of what cryptomatte is. Currently, I'm using a workflow, where I use Blackmagic Fusion to prepare my alpha masks from the cryptomatte pass to use in Affinity Photo, which brings me to my other problem, which is premultiplication of images with alpha, which I find difficult to manage. And which causes some amount of problems even with my current workflow. But this could only be a problem on my side. I'll try and start another thread on this topic.

[travisrogers]

ThiThis isn't the best solution as Photoshop is an expensive plugin in this case, but I open the file through EXR/IO in PS, have it auto generate the alpha masks from the cryptomatte and then I re-save it as an EXR that I then open in Affinity. This gives me perfect masks without having to do crude color selects in AP. Of course this functionality is a must have for AP. Hopefully they'll get around to building it in sooner than later.

@James Ritson I'm sure the AP team already has this on the to-do list, but I thought I'd copy you just in case.

 

Best / Travis