Indigo Renderer Forum

I've seen this brought up a few times in the forums, but I'd like to request an option to specify bit depth when saving images. is there an option to change it through Indigo's dialogs?

most of the time 8 bit is fine for my purposes, but I've had to deal with color break-up and banding on occasion (see attached image) and in 16 bit you have a lot more control over those kinds of issues. the sample images here were made with the new sky model, by the way (awesome).

I know one solution is saving out an exr, but then you have to tweak exposure and gamma and all that in an external imaging program, and it's a struggle to match the look of Indigo's output that way.

let me know what you think, thanks!

At the moment no 16bit saving of images is possible in Indigo, afaik even used 16bit textures get downgraded to 8bit :/

FakeShamus wrote:I know one solution is saving out an exr, but then you have to tweak exposure and gamma and all that in an external imaging program, and it's a struggle to match the look of Indigo's output that way.

Only thing you need to "fix" is setting the gamma to 0.454545454545... nothing more!

16bit-support is really much appreciated.

Zom-B wrote:Only thing you need to "fix" is setting the gamma to 0.454545454545... nothing more!

Interesting - I will give that a try. Still, it seems like something Indigo should be able to do. I remember even in my early days using PovRay you had the option to render out to 16 bit png.

zeitmeister wrote:16bit-support is really much appreciated.

+8

I've been trying to make do with the .exr, but the gamma adjustment does not seem to work as expected.
I thought maybe it was the difference between tonemapped and untonemapped exr, but setting the gamma to 0.454545 is not even close to the 8-bit output in either case. maybe I'm doing something wrong...

FakeShamus wrote:I thought maybe it was the difference between tonemapped and untonemapped exr, but setting the gamma to 0.454545 is not even close to the 8-bit output in either case. maybe I'm doing something wrong...

The tonemapped EXR is the one to compare and covert with GAmma 0.454545...
The untonemapped one is RAW output without tonemapping, so you can tonemap in your own App if you like.

setting The Gamma is done in the "Exposure" setting In PS for example, see image:

Here a example of the output:
Doing this comparison I just stumbled upon some small but visible differance in displaying the dark areas of the image, see here for the Bugreport.

yeah I know I'm doing the photoshop part right.
problem was with the 0.454545 - doesn't work if you are calibrated to gamma 1.8 (on my Mac) you have to go with 0.55555... makes sense.

still, I get a slight but noticeable color shift when I do that conversion. it is much better than I was experiencing before, but still not quite right, (see attached). I think your bug report is correct...

Very nice and explanatory image ZomB.
Stuff like that belongs into the Indigo documentation package.