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EXR converter

An .exr file is an OpenEXR image: a high-dynamic-range raster format that stores scene-referred light values as floating-point numbers rather than display-ready 8-bit codes. It is the working image format of visual effects and animation, where a frame has to survive repeated relighting, grading, and compositing without the highlights and shadows being thrown away.

Private for supported formats — processed in your browser

Convert supported files

Runs on your device

Drop EXR files here

Batch files can each use a different output. Nothing uploads for local conversions.

Working inputs include camera RAW, browser-local audio/video, PDF, CBZ/CBR comics, office documents, ebooks, markup, 3D models, structured text, images, and archives.

Where EXR comes from

Industrial Light & Magic developed OpenEXR internally and released it as open source in 2003, together with the 16-bit half float type it popularised. Version 2.0 in 2013 added multi-part files and deep pixel samples for compositing, stewardship moved to the Academy Software Foundation in 2019, and OpenEXR 3.0 followed in 2021 with the Imath library split out.

How EXR works

  • Pixels are 16-bit half float, 32-bit float, or 32-bit unsigned integer, one value per channel, with no fixed 0-1 ceiling
  • Arbitrary named channels: R/G/B/A plus depth, motion vectors, object IDs, and per-light render passes in a single file
  • Ten codecs are defined, including lossless RLE, ZIPS, ZIP and PIZ and lossy B44, PXR24 and DWAA/DWAB
  • Scanline or tiled layouts, optional mipmap and ripmap levels, and multi-part files that hold several images at once
  • Deep pixels store an arbitrary number of depth samples per pixel for volumetric compositing

When to use EXR

  • Rendered frames handed between a renderer, a compositor, and a grading suite
  • ACES colour-managed film and television finishing
  • High-dynamic-range environment and reflection maps for image-based lighting
  • Texture and lookup data where 8-bit banding would be visible

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Floating-point pixels keep specular highlights and deep shadows that 8-bit formats clip away
  • Multiple channels and layers travel in one file instead of a folder of renders
  • Open specification with a permissive licence and a mature reference implementation

Limitations

  • Files are large, and the lossless codecs help far less than they do on 8-bit imagery
  • No browser displays it, so the web always needs a converted copy
  • Scene-linear values have no single correct 8-bit rendering, so any conversion is an editorial choice

Compatibility

Nuke, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Houdini, Maya, Photoshop, Affinity Photo, GIMP and Krita all read and write OpenEXR, and macOS previews it through ImageIO. No browser decodes it natively. This converter parses it in the page with three.js's EXRLoader, then renders the float pixels to 8-bit by clamping to the display range and applying the sRGB transfer function — nothing above 1.0 survives, no exposure is guessed, and no local tone operator is applied, so the same file always produces the same pixels.

Metadata lives in typed header attributes: chromaticities, white luminance, capture date, owner, camera transform matrices and free-form strings. There is no EXIF or ID3 block, and this converter's raster outputs do not carry the header attributes across.

Convert EXR to another format