No preview or thumbnail for Photoshop files
I've started a new catalog after buying a new camera, and already I've run into a problem: Out of the 7 photoshop files that I have, 5 of them show up as pure white in both the thumbnail and the preview.
These Photoshop files started from 16-bit TIFFs in Wide Gamut RGB. They have several layers in them for applying HSL, Curves, and sharpening.
Rebuilding with Cmd-B has no effect, nor does the action log complain.
Is this a known bug?
These Photoshop files started from 16-bit TIFFs in Wide Gamut RGB. They have several layers in them for applying HSL, Curves, and sharpening.
Rebuilding with Cmd-B has no effect, nor does the action log complain.
Is this a known bug?
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Try this.
Under the Edit>preferences>media rendering menu, set the preferred engine to Windows Imaging Component (WIC)
Then do a rebuild on the selected files.
The PO engine doesn't seem to like PSD and multilayer Tiff files.
Good luck,
Jim0 -
I'm using a Mac, so my only options are Apple and Phase One. Neither is able to preview my Photoshop files. Haven't had any problems with ordinary 16-bit TIFFs. 0 -
[quote="NNN634550888500443360" wrote:
Is this a known bug?
Not a bug but a "feature", and it's actually in Photoshop. Your images have layers and what Media Pro is showing is just one of these layers. There used to be a way of tabbing through each of the layers but can't remember what the keystrokes for this are - and it doesn't solve your problem anyway.
The solution is actually within Photoshop. In the Preferences section under File Handling (at least in CS3 and CS5.1) is a drop down called "Maximise PSD and PSB File Compatibility". You need to change this to "Yes" and then resave your images. What this will do is add a flattened version of the image with the PSD file. It won't affect the layered content, although it will result in a larger file size, and also slightly increase the processing time. Then Media Pro should be able to get a correct thumbnail and preview.
See for more information.
Ian0 -
Yes, that did "solve" the problem, but at the cost of adding over 100-150 MB *per file*!! Is there any chance Media Pro can be improved to not require this workaround, since Adobe Bridge was able to render thumbnails and previews just fine. In fact, at this kind of cost, I may just avoid working with Photoshop files in Media Pro altogether. 0 -
I doubt that Media Pro can even be changed to get around this issue. You are asking it to understand the PSD (and PSB) file formats and to be able to process them and combine layers correctly. This would have to be backwards compatible with all the different versions of these files that there has been. This file layout is proprietary to Adobe, so it's no wonder that Bridge can handle these files - it uses the exact same code.
One of the comments in the link I added was that there were no non-Adobe applications that were known to get around this issue. That's either because Adobe don't or won't license the required code or that no-one wants to reverse engineer it, which would be illegal anyway!
My understanding is that apart from JPG and TIFF files, where the formats are public knowledge, Media Pro and its predecessors have no capability to decode other image formats. They have always used third-party tools to do this. In the early days this was with QuickTime, so when a new camera came out you couldn't catalogue its images until Apple had released an updated QuickTime - and this is still true. When Microsoft took over they changed this to use QuickTime if on a Mac and a WIC Codec if on Windows. Phase One has kept this up - although there is probably code in there - borrowed from Capture One - to handle their own cameras where they do know the image format.
If you see other applications that render images - and this excludes embedded JPG previews - then they are either using similar third party tools or have done the hard work in decoding an image format. Once you do that you have to keep doing it for each new camera...
If maximising the capability of your PSD files is adding 100+ MB per file then it would indicate that these files are already huge in size, so I'm not sure what the issue is here.
I looked at Fast Picture Viewer to see what their Codecs will do - http://www.fastpictureviewer.com/formats/ - and it will try simple layer blending but I guess that means they can't guarantee the quality. They recommend saving in Maximised Compatability mode.
Ian0 -
My images are 250 MB before using maximized compatability, and 370 MB after. That's an increase of 50%.
I wouldn't mind if the previews only used the base layer, as that would be good enough to know what's in the Photoshop file. I don't need my preview to include the effects from the sharpening and curves adjustment layers.
What's further interesting here is that although I'm using the Phase One rendering engine, yet Media Pro can generate previews of my .CR2 file from a Canon 5D Mark III. Is it falling back to the Apple engine to decode these files that Media Pro doesn't know about yet?0 -
This is in the documentation for the original iView which I found still on line - it's probably a Microsoft controlled domain that should have been transferred to Phase One when they bought the package. On page 2 of this document - - it describes how to flip through the layers in a PSD file and how to assign one of them as the thumbnail.
This used to work in iView Media Pro but can't say whether Microsoft or Phase One have "broken" this functionality since then. I don't have any suitable files to test with at the moment.
It might help, although will need a few extra steps in your workflow. It might be a step too far though.
Ian0 -
I saw that in my many web searches, thanks for looking. But those pager elements don't appear in Phase One's Media Pro, for any Photoshop file. Looks like that support got dropped. 0
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