Opening HDR in photoshop

[bparke]

When we render an image out to the HDR format we can open it in Preview or Quick Look (Mac) and they are great, but when we open them in Photoshop they are opening very washed out and under saturated. Photoshop is defaulting to the Radiance image format when we open the file and I'm thinking there must be way to open them in Photoshop and retain the quality of the HDR.

Thanks for any help.

[except]

The quality is retained. It's just that PS's default gamma is different than Lw's standard HDR saving.

After opening an HDR image in PS, go to Image > Adjustments > Exposure and set the Gamma to 0.5. Then it's exactly as it looked in the render preview and in LW image viewer.

[darickster]

photoshop presumes a gamma of 2.2 in HDR images so the value has to be set to 0.454 to be precise.. (1/2.2)

although macs used to be on gamma 1.8 than it should be 0.55 but think the 1.8 days are over..