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Alexandr270468245lcm
Participant
October 20, 2025
Open for Voting

OpenEXR open options

  • October 20, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 260 views

Hello.
In the new Photoshop Beta update, the way OpenEXR files open has changed, and there are now many new options. I noticed a small issue that makes work a bit less convenient.

There are still options to open a file “as transparency” or “as alpha channel”, but now when choosing “as alpha channel”, Photoshop automatically adds an alpha mask to the layer. This isn’t always needed, and when loading many layers into a stack, it takes extra time to delete all those masks one by one.

It would be really helpful to have an option to open EXR files “as alpha channel” without adding a mask to the layer. Also now it takes much more time to open many files

It would also be nice to have more control over how layers are opened when loading them into a stack using scripts. Sometimes it needed to open 1 layer “as transparency” and all other “as alpha channel” Thank you

    2 replies

    C
    Adobe Employee
    cody_cuellar
    Adobe Employee
    April 6, 2026

    Thanks for the detailed feedback. The option "as alpha channel" does not exist anymore. Historically, Photoshop had two ways of interpreting alpha, one would treat it as layer transparency which treated the image as 'premultiplied'. The other option was to stuff the alpha into the channels palette which treated the image as 'straight'.

     

    When we recently updated our entire EXR read/write and PSD integration, we needed to allow users to choose where alpha goes as well as how to interpret the incoming image to support all workflows. Additionally, we now support multi-layer EXRS, so the channels palette is no longer an option for storing the alpha, as it would not be associated with the correct layer, and each layer would clobber the previous alpha.

     

    The new equivalent to the legacy 'as alpha channel' is to open with 'unaltered' alpha handling and using the 'layer user mask' option. That way the alpha stays associated with the correct layer for both single and multi-layer EXRs.

     

    When alpha is embedded in the image, by convention it's treated as transparency in the composite math so we default to using the alpha in the composite.

     

    A couple of questions:

    • If there are workflows where you'd prefer alpha treated as more of a selection mask rather than transparency, we could maybe add an option to the open dialog to disable user masks on open. Would that address your use case?
    • Can you describe how you are 'loading many layers into a stack'? Since we now support multi-layer EXR, you can open a single EXR with all the layers and channels already embedded if the app creating the EXRs supports it.
    • Can you also clarify what scripting method you're referring to to open the files?
      PixelDeluxe
      PixelDeluxe
      Known Participant
      April 17, 2026

      This new system is completely broken. I rely heavily on the old options for client’s work - with having either, or sometimes both ‘as alpha channel’ or ‘as transparency’ options in my layer stacks.

      “The new equivalent to the legacy 'as alpha channel' is to open with 'unaltered' alpha handling and using the 'layer user mask' option. That way the alpha stays associated with the correct layer for both single and multi-layer EXRs.”

      This simply doesn’t work, no matter what options I use I see transparency in my render passes/layers rather than black. Please either revert to the previous system that worked perfectly well, or urgently fix the bug ASAP. I’m going to have to roll back to a previous version of Photoshop to continue to use it.

      C
      Adobe Employee
      cody_cuellar
      Adobe Employee
      April 18, 2026

      Just so I understand the issue you’re having - the desire here is to be able to open single-layer EXRs as smart object in a parent document? In this case the new EXR loading does not allow to ignore alpha as transparency when it exists as a user mask INSIDE that smart object?

       

      This is understandable, and we’ll investigate how we can make this workflow work similarly to the legacy plugin.

      AlePaxND
      AlePaxND
      Participant
      April 2, 2026

      This. 110%.

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