Photoshop 27.5 broke openEXR color

Hi ​@AlePaxND, there’s an ongoing discussion over here about the new EXR plugin: 

In the most recent Beta are some updates to improve the terminology around alpha handling, and we also included a new option ‘Ignore Alpha’, which should give you behavior similar to the old ‘as alpha channel’ option and will load the EXR with alpha disabled. Please have a look if it meets your needs.

Thanks for the feedback — we understand that workflow changes can be frustrating, and we want to make the transition as smooth as possible for all users.

These updates came from long-standing requests and collaboration with VFX studios who regularly work with multi-layer EXRs needing full EXR 2.0 spec support and non-destructive alpha handling. In order to align more closely with the EXR standard and support all EXR data, some changes to file opening behaviors were necessary.

Since alpha must stay associated with the correct layer with multiple RGBA layers, the 'as alpha channel' was no longer an option, so 'as alpha channel' was no longer viable — layer transparency and alpha mask are now the two destinations to keep EXR files fully round-trippable.

That said, you can replicate the old compositing behavior today: select **Unaltered** for alpha handling and **User Mask** for alpha placement, then disable the mask. That gives you the same result as the legacy "as alpha channel" option, while being able to preserve alpha on write.

We're considering a **"disable alpha on load"** option so you can start from plain RGB just like the alpha mask legacy option with no transparency applied by default. Would that help your workflow?

Hello, thanks for the feedback. The reason this changed is we simply can’t just keep the old behavior and support all the modern EXR features. We had to change a few behaviors to be able to update our EXR reading/writing to support the full EXR spec. Take a look at my response to this other thread here: 

I’ll summarize by pointing out that it appears you do not have a render/alpha in the typical sense of transparency for compositing. Rather, it appears your render is a pre-composited RGB image with a selection mask as alpha. Since this isn’t the typical meaning of transparency per the EXR spec, the default settings probably won’t produce what you’re looking for. The good news is with the updates we made, we now have options to support all use cases. The new EXR handling does not have an ‘as alpha channel’ option anymore since it would make it impossible to support multi-layer EXRs.

The correct options for what you are doing should be ‘unaltered’ alpha handling and having Ps place them in a user mask, which is what you selected in your last example. This appears correct and you shouldn’t need the color fill behind since you have all opaque data on the ‘RGB’ layer with the mask disabled. Let me know if those settings work for you and what we can do to make it more streamlined for these workflows.

In the latest update Adobe changed the way EXR files are loaded in Photoshop (nobody asked for that, but hey, they know what ther’re doing! NOT.) 

Now you’re prompted to load the alpha as layer mask or transparency, but there’s no option to have it loaded as plain simple channel... (Adobe, do you know RGBA?)

Can we have it back please? (And maybe do not break things in the future too?)