Combined lossy and lossless compression of the high dynamic range information

One of the image formats supported by ImageConverter Plus is EXR, that has an official name “OpenEXR”. It lets you store an unlimited number of images in the same file in any bit depth you want. This is a high dynamic range format used in imaging applications. ImageConverter Plus supports this image format for both types of conversion – input and output. The main features of the EXR format are: multiple lossy and lossless image compression algorithms, extensibility and higher dynamic range. ImageConverter Plus supports all the possible variations of the EXR format. When converting images to EXR there are several compression algorithms available: RLE (which is a default setting), ZIP, ZIPS, PIX, PXR24. For scanline-based files PIZ compression should be faster than ZIP compression, although ZIP decompresses faster than PIZ. PIZ does not work well for tiled files, unless the tiles are fairly large – maybe 256×256 or 512×512 pixels. For smaller tiles we recommend that you use ZIP or PXR24. If you deal with a situation when your computer won’t open an EXR file the best advice we can give is to convert your EXR image to JPEG or other image format in order to make it more universally recognizable.