Hey!
Do you want to color correct your posters but keep getting mad because so much detail is just lost?
Then this guide might just be the thing for you!

My name is Fames. I've been using SFM since April 2015 and did a "few" posters.

In this guide I'll show you how you can increase the amount of detail available for post processing your posters.

My dA[xmindblowx.deviantart.com]
My Tumblr[notmindblow.tumblr.com]
If you see any formatting code, the chance is at 90% it's because of Steam duplicating the "code" making it appear twice

.PFM (Portable Float Map) files are capable of storing images with floating point information up to 32 bit per channel, making it suitable for HDR!
There are 2 forms of PFM rendering in SFM. I'm only going to talk about one in this guide, as the other one is rarely (if ever) used.

The one I'm talking about can be found when you render a "Image Sequence" in SFM and select PFM from the dropdown menu.

When you render a usual poster, the image either gets exported as a JPG or PNG alongside with a TGA. These files are rendered with a color depth of 8bpc (bit per channel) and JPG even uses compression on the image. That's even more detail lost!
PFM on the other hand, gets exported with a color depth of 32bpc. That's more detail than your monitor can even display!

Side note: HDR10 (which modern TV use) only uses 10bpc

If my monitor can't display all the data PFM delivers, why would I use it then? Simple.
Post processing.

Your monitor might not be able to display all the data, but programs like Photoshop can read it and use it. For example, each pixel has enough data, it knows it has a slight red-ish tint to it, eventhough your monitor displays it at pure white! So when you turn down the exposure, very bright parts are still bright and don't get washed out like they would with normal 8bpc rendering.

Examples:

Original:


-2.5 Exposure with 32bpc


-2.5 Exposure with 8bpc


Night and day difference! Look at the sun! It's not getting "bleached" out in the 32bpc file because Photoshop knows that it's brighter than R255 G255 B255!

So know that you know all the goodies about PFM, you probably want to use it.
To render a PFM in SFM, you go to the movie rendering either via pressing CTRL + M, or
use the export tab as seen below.



Then change the Export mode to Image Sequence and change the duration to custom, set seconds to frames and change 1440 to 1 to render a single image. You can also adjust your render settings in the "More options" dropdown.



You can also change the resolution, but you'll notice that the highest resolution is 1280x720 or 720p.
To fix this, you launch SFM in a higher resolution with the launch option -sfm_resolution X

X= 1080/1440/2160 (1080p/1440p/2160p(4K))



To open the launch options, right click SFM in steam and go to Properties->Set launch options.

Then you just have to export the image and you're pretty much done with the SFM part!

When you render a PFM and open it in Photoshop you will probably be greeted with this:



Don't panic yet! Just select "Use the embedded profile (instead of the working space)" so that Photoshop uses the color profile that SFM exported with.

Now that you're in Photoshop, you can check the color depth of the image by going to Image->Mode and you should see that 32Bits/Channel is auto-selected.

You might notice that some options like Curves or Liquify are disabled right now, this is because Photoshop doesn't really like working with 32bpc images.
!The only things you do in this 32bpc file is initial post processing!

The workflow I use for PFM is:

Export as PFM -> Initial Post Process in Photoshop -> Export as PNG -> Secondary Post Process (Liquify/Curves for example) -> Export final PNG -> Upload

Sadly, PFM does also come with some drawbacks. Most noticable one being the huge filesize.
A 3840x2160 (4K) PFM file is about 95MB

As mentioned earlier, Photoshop doesnt like the usual workflow of just editing everything in 1 file when working with PFM. This means that more files have to exported, taking up even more space and taking more time.

It's also annoying to always launch SFM in 1080p/1440p/2160p if you want a decent high-res poster going.

AO quality also gets affected, because unlike poster rendering, the movie export doesnt tile the poster. So if you zoom into it, some AO might still be grainy, even if you set the sample rate to 1024.

32bpc image sequences are made with video making in mind, which is probably a reason why Photoshop doesn't really support it. But that doesn't mean we can't use it.

I hope this guide helped you!

If you still have any questions regarding SFM and PFM, please ask ahead!
Thank you so much for reading this guide!

If you want to check out any of my work, check out my Tumblr[notmindblow.tumblr.com]!

// I wanted to edit guide this to include how to use PFM in After Effects'n'♥♥♥♥ but I've since lost motivation to keep this guide up, sorry folks!