Adobe Bridge – Full screen preview tips

Posted on by Oded Maoz Erell

Software:
Adobe Bridge 2020

  1. To get into full screen preview mode:
    Select an image and press Spacebar
  2. Use the arrow keys to navigate images in the folder
  3. Scroll the mouse wheel to zoom in-out

Note:
In full screen mode, you may see the images display soft / low resolution,
Even if the actual image files have enough resolution to fit the display.
This happens because Bridge’s cached previews were not generated at display resolution.
To fix this issue:

  1. In Edit > Preferences > Advanced:
    Check the Generate Monitor-Size Previews option
    Br
  2. In Tools > Cache >Manage Cache..:
    Select Clean Up Cache, Purge all local cache files,
    And then click Next.
    * You may have to restart the program for this to take effect
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Blender 2.83 – OSL bug and fix

Posted on by Oded Maoz Erell

Software:
Blender 2.83

I recently found that some of my OSL shaders don’t work in Blender 2.83.
More specifically, shaders compiled with Blender 2.83 had their microfacet bsdf not recognized by the renderer and return 0.
* Shaders that were compiled by previous versions did work.
Looking into the problem I found that the OSL source files that ship with Blender 2.83 are significantly different than the files shipped with previous versions.

Simple fix:
Copy the stdosl.h and oslutil.h from Blender 2.82 to 2.83.
On Windows these files are found in this folder:
C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.83\2.83\scripts\addons\cycles\shader

* I’m not suggesting to download the files strait from ImageWorks GitHub because I’m not sure the ones that ship with Blender & Cycles are not modified.

I have reported the bug here.

Related:
Using OSL Shaders in Blender & Cycles

Premiere – ‘Composite in Linear Color’ breaks dissolve transitions?..

Posted on by Oded Maoz Erell

Software:
Premiere Pro CC 2018

I was baffled,
Not understanding why my dissolve transitions in a new Premiere project are not linear, and too lift too fast,
I validated this in the Lumetri Scopes window.
In an older project, at 50 percent transition duration, white color is at 50 percent intensity like you’d expect from a linear transition.
But in my new project, at 50 percent transition duration, white color is at about 75 + percent intensity as if it’s gamma corrected.

Solution:
After some web research in discussion groups, I found that the option that doe’s that is:
Sequence Settings > Composite in Linear Color
And unchecking it solves the problem.

It’s still weird to me that Composite in Linear Color breaks the linearity of the dissolve transition,
But at least there is a solution.

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Photoshop CC 2018 EXR Loading Freeze

Posted on by Oded Maoz Erell

Software:
Photoshop CC 2018

Iv’e encountered a problem with loading EXR files into Photoshop CC 2018.
About 50 percent of the times the software would freeze during the load operation,
It would happen on files that I have opened many times before with previous versions of the software, and also on different PC’s.

After some testing it seams that maybe the problem is with EXR files that are compressed using PIZ Wavelet compression, although I can’t be sure because I couldn’t reproduce the problem with such files created with Blender, the problem only seams to happen with files created with 3ds max.

Does it make sense that Photoshop CC 2018 would have a problem with PIZ Compressed EXR files created with 3ds max?

I don’t know, but from the tests I did at the studio this seam to be the case…

I would love to get more info or clarification on this.

Adobe Bridge Warning

Posted on by Oded Maoz Erell

Software:
Adobe Bridge CC 2017

Adobe Bridge is very useful for browsing media in a CG \ Animation workflow,
mainly because it displays thumbnails and previews for EXR files, something that Windows Explorer doesn’t do, and also because it has cool batch functions like loading files as layers in a new Photoshop document and so on,
But I encountered a behavior that can be problematic,
The software uses caching for the thumbs and filmstrip preview in order to display the images faster,
And in some cases where you render updated files with the same folder structure and same names, Bridge will display the older preview images from it’s cache even if you manually deleted the whole folder structure prior to re-rendering!!
I stumbled across this issue when browsing render tests being confused as to why Blender rendered images with old settings, I naturally thought Blender was to blame (I tend to think that a media viewer can’t be the problem because it just displays images..) and looked through the render setting trying to understand what went wrong,
Eventually I found the cause of the problem in Bridge,
And there’s a simple solution with the command:
Tools > Purge > Purge cache for _______ folder
But you still have to be mindful that you might be seeing old renders, otherwise you won’t perform this important action.