Viewing/editing HDRI files

[romullus]

I wonder what do people use for viewing and/or basic editing of HDRI/EXR files? I use Picturenaut for viewing, but it's super outdated and it would be nice to have something more recent and maybe more capable for that. As for the editing, my situation is even worse, i have Affinity Photo, but i never managed to get something useful with it. It has tools for editing, but for some reason it can't save HDRIs properly - i always end up with ruined HDRI files from Affinity. Admittedly i don't use HDRIs often, but once or twice a year i need to make some basic edits and i always struggle with that, so i would gladly listen if anyone has to share their experience.

[James Vella]

For viewing all images I use imageglass. Opensource, great color picker and image viewer all round.

I dont edit hdri cant offer anything there. I still use photoshop/natron for high bit files, natron more for photoshop automation (similar to nuke but free).

[pokoy]

Good question, I'd love to hear some opinions, too. I have a lot of panoramas that need tripod/shadow removal and would love to know which apps that offers spherical display + retouching (or some losless on-the-fly conversion between cube/equirectangular) and retains all HDR data. It's a bit tedious to go forth and back between different apps for this.
Photoshop cripples 32f HDRs and will only open/save 16f (and actually uses 15 bits internally if I'm not mistaken...). 16 bits are good enough for most cases, but there's definitely a difference in sun intensity with 32 vs 16 bits in some of my panos. Looking forward to hear what others use.

[arqrenderz]

To  view EXR files i use DJview, also to view any kind of image sequence, its an awesome tool, performance is great also, much faster to open BIG exr`s than photoshop

https://darbyjohnston.github.io/DJV/

[romullus]

Thank you for replies guys.

@James Vella, Imageglass is my default picture viewer, but it never crossed my mind to use it as a HDRI viewer. Just tried out of interest and hmm... it's pretty clear that out of all my tools that's capable to open HDRI, Imageglass is the worst. It's great for viewing regular images though.

@arqrenderz, thanks, i will take a look at DJV

[James Vella]

Ah you want to adjust the exposure on the fly?

[romullus]

Yes, that would be a big plus, but also i don't want HDRIs to be displayed in wrong gamma and Imageglass can't do even that.

[James Vella]

Have you tried chaos player?

[romullus]

No, i haven't, but isn't it only available with premium subscription?

[James Vella]

Yep. We used it at my last studio for exr/hdr files. I havent used it since but I did like it.

[burnin]

tev — The EXR Viewer   

Image viewer and comparison tool for graphics people.

    Lightning fast: starts up instantly, loads hundreds of images in seconds.
    Versatile: supports many file formats, tonemapping operators, error metrics, histograms, and pixel peeping.
    HDR: displays true HDR on Apple EDR displays.


https://github.com/Tom94/tev

[romullus]

That sounds very interesting. Thanks burnin, i will definitely check the app.