Maxwell Render

The latest Lightroom and Camera-Raw support direct editing of 32 Bit imagery.
Essentially everybody who owns Photoshop therefore has a very nice arsenal of lossless editing-operations at disposal.

While I greatly appreciate that an extension has been written to bring mxi's into Photoshop:
It would even be much cooler if one could output a floating-point format which can be opened with Camera-Raw or
Lightroom (same engine-just different GUI).
That way one could develop using the Raw-Engine and bring the into Photoshop as Smart-Objects, which seems
like a very attractive option to me.

Wouldn't saving a render as 32b tiff and importing that into Lightroom accomplish the same thing?

_________________
Next Limit Team
Merchant of happiness

In principle that should do. But does it work?
Someone else had to check. I'll get my CS6-Update in a couple of days.
In CS5 one could not open 32 Bit Tifs in Camera-Raw, 16Bit was the maximum in that release.

My suggestion was of a bit more general nature.
I just found good if the postproduction-route via Photoshop (which probably a great majority of your customers take) got finetuned
as good as possible. Ideally I would envision raw-processing of the Render-channel in Camera-Raw and by sending to PS all additionally
written single passes were automatically merged into that psd.
Lightroom-Users might even be able to use Render-Passes in Lightroom directly with Perfect Layers.

I don't know about Lightroom, but you can open up MXIs directly in Photoshop. Once you install the Maxwell-Plugin for PS you get all the render layers in a single PSD and in 32 bits. Once you bounce down to 16 or 8 bits, pretty much the same interface as in the first screenshot of your link pops up.

Anything I missed in editing functionality?

Yes. About everything

Photoshop comes with a very advanced Raw-Editing engine which is available in an external interface called Camera-Raw.
The exact same engine re-branded and with comfortable Image-Management-Capabilties added is called Lightroom and sold separately.

This Raw-Engine has many unique Tools which are extremely useful for losslessly processing Photos as well as digital
renderings. None of these tools are available inside of Photoshop. One thus far could open up to 16 Bit per Channel in the Raw-Engine,
but now even 32 Bit are supported.
It imo would make a lot of sense to offer best as possible support for anyone who wants to take this route, especially as it
comes at no extra costs if one owns Photoshop.

PS: I am familiar with the Photoshop-Plugin and its capabilities.

Sorry, I now saw you mention this. Well - the idea is to do this in 32 Bit.

install CS5/CS6 Script: Edit Layers in ACR 1.1.5 from: http://www.russellbrown.com/scripts.html
and you'll be able to edit layer in Camera RAW in PS, also you'll be able to change it later as you wish

Russell Brown -I actually swore that I'll never watch a video by this freakin Fare-Tale-Uncle of the CG-world again

Thanks d76, that is actually a very interesting script, especially as it allows you to use Layermasks which one
normally can not access in ACR. It however only supports 16bit (which is already cool too, no question).

ah, you're right, it gets converted to 16 bit.. didn't check it thoroughly

I see. I only have CS5 as a reference. So for me there's no difference between importing an image with camera raw and bouncing 32bit to 16.

Might be interesting to know whether CS6 now supports curves and such in 32bits. If it does, Camera Raw would be no more than a nice GUI.

Hi Hannes,

have a look here.
It's of course mostly marketing and about compositing several photographs to an "ordinary" hdr-image. But it shows that all Raw-Tools are now available for 32 bit too.

I don't understand this bit.

What I mean is that Camera Raw right now is a tool to import images that are not in 8/16 bit regular pixel format to exactly that (8 or 16bit, regular RGB pixels).

With CS5, very useful features like Curves aren't available for 32bit images. If they are with Camera Raw in CS6 then it makes Camera Raw stand out. If the same 32 compatibility now exists for regular curves in Photoshop, Camera Raw would be nothing more than a nice GUI, displaying all the cool new 32bit adjustments at once. You could just do the same by importing the MXI in 32bit and adding an adjustment laxer for each plugin.

With CS5, Camera Raw operates on a max of 16 bits and I know of no camera that supports more than that (might be wrong here). So all Camera Raw in CS5 really does is convert and upscale the raw cameras data to 16bit and give all the functionality there is in PS for 16 bits a nice all-at-once interface. You could just create a set of adjustment layers, that had the exact same nondestructive effects. This might be not as easy to use but has the same result.

But I never really maxed out all teh functionality there probably is in Camera Raw. So my judgement may be just wrong.

The 32bit features available inside PS CS6 seem to be the same as in CS5.
One of course may argue why Adobe doesn't do everything within the same application but when bringing stuff in from ACR as Smart Objects the connection is really tight.
Maybe even the Script d76 mentioned could get tweaked now. Ideally you then could open a .mxi with Photoshop along with additional channel-layers in PS and on doubleclick on the render-layer it opened in ACR, respecting Layer-Masks of course.