bmobius

Dear Serif and the Affinity Photo dev team... THANK YOU SO MUCH! I fired up the Customer Beta that I keep installed along side my regular release of AP. Imagine my surprise when I checked the export options and saw .TGA as an export option! I'll be running around work tomorrow like a lunatic informing every single artist about this! Additionally, There's going to be more than a few of our tech supervisors that are going to be excited as well. I'm hoping studio management gets around to upgrading to Affinity Photo before the end of the week!

That is fantastic news! Andy, please give our sincerest thanks to yourself, other moderators, and the talented developers at Serif for going forward with .TGA implementation!

THIS! All of this! Even if you only consider .TGA a legacy format, there is still a sizeable number of artists working with this venerable format. It would be a great addition to have .TGA export included either natively OR as a plugin. I too am also a huge fan of .DDS and the way it handles mipmaps and I would be delighted as can be to see that implemented as well. Getting back to the point, Affinity Photo is SO CLOSE to being a perfect replacement (GENERALLY SPEAKING) for Photoshop, at least from a game development / game artist standpoint. Other talented artists that I currently have the privilege of working with are eagerly watching to see how AP continues to develop. Many of them have their hands on their wallets, ready to scoop up a copy just for their own use. Lastly, as AP can effectively import .TGA, how hard would it be to also allow for export? I encourage Serif to give this format some serious consideration and move to implement as soon as possible in one of their upcoming updates!

The .TGA format is still used widely in the game development industry. This is especially true when regarding older engines still in use by a number of game dev studios. I get that folks using products such as Affinity Photo are using it for, well, photo manipulation. If that's all Serif wants Affinity Photo to be, then it's understandable that implementing .tga export and better alpha channel control isn't necessary. But then again, wouldn't Serif love to have additional customers, in game development, attempting to move away from Photoshop find a home with Affinity Photo? Wouldn't that also, may, just perhaps convince them to make use of the other Affinity apps such as Designer (for creating UIs and such)? Most of our management team and product research team at our studio do not relish the the monthly outlay of money to maintain multiple Photoshop CC seats. Affinity offers a superior product at a vastly superior pricing model. Those of us that have adopted Affinity Photo out of our own pockets, who also see the need for .TGA and better alpha channel control wouldn't be asking if .png and .tiff did what we needed them to do. This is a matter of not only workflow speed but also the need for legacy file format interaction. Lastly, and this is important, most of the other products used with legacy formats such as .TGA also do have .PNG. and sometimes .TIFF import. But when you state that we should hit up a number of multiple vendors and tell them that their apps all need better PNG and TIFF support, it kinda comes off as dismissive. Those of us, in a number of other threads in the Affinity forums no less, who use Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are asking that our image editing app of choice (read: Affinity) export .TGA so we can use them with a host of other apps. Allow me to furnish an theoretical situation. Say we have 12 other apps that use the .TGA file format. Management doesn't wish to spend money purchasing licenses for a number of other apps for updated or "superior" file formats. Doing such would seriously impacted limited funds. Along comes an image editing app that represents as a real alternative to a subscription based software. Management thus concludes that purchasing 15 seats / 15 licenses of Affinity Photo and Designer would be far more cost effective in the long term. The Affinity apps need just two things to be viable for that. those two things are .TGA and alpha channel manipulation. The funny thing about the above theoretical situation is that this actually happened. So look at it this way. It's a win for Serif to be flexible with their exportable file formats. Serif gets even more customers moving away for your competitor and those same customers get a more feature complete application for use in their professional field. I love Affinity Photo. I will keep using it every single day. Just please take a moment and ask the Affinity development team to put this request into the Affinity suite.

I do think that the Solidify plugin from Flaming Pear (if that's the one your referencing) is a great plugin. However, most apps with texture baking such as Blender, 3DS Max, Maya, Blender, Knald, xNormal, Marmomset Toolbag, Substance Painter, and Substance Designer (just to name a few) have settings that will allow you to set pixel padding. This essentially limits the use of Solidify for most texture development to a case by case basis. So If I export a baked texture map from say Marmoset Toolbag with a pixel padding of 8 as an 8-bit .TGA, I can easily import into Photoshop CC and see the very same alpha transparency that I did in Marmoset. The alpha channel already has the dithering as expected from Marmoset export. I get a 1-to-1, WYSIWYG interoperability between both apps. That alone, let me tell you , is a significant help in the speed of my personal workflow and for others on my team. No need for a third-party plugin such as Solidify. Also, let's look at the example of transparency in dealing with such things as hair cards for character models. Obviously any file format such as .TGA that implements alpha channel transparency is perfect for hair cards. Same for feathers, fur, and cloth opacity. It should be noted that Marmoset Tool, which I'm using here for my examples, has only 4 image export options. .PSD, .PNG, ,JPG, and (you guessed it) .TGA. Considering this is a professional piece of software, used extensively by both the 3D modeling and game dev industries, it is still limited is its export options but still makes use of .TGA for flexibility. So let me close by saying that I believe Solidify is a fantastic plugin. For the purposes of this thread however, I am attempting to make a worthwhile case to Serif Labs for proper .TGA implementation for both import and export.

And thank you for letting me vent. To reiterate, I absolutely love Affinity Photo. It does almost everything I need it to do that I once used Photoshop for. Given the lack of innovative features for the subscription price that Adobe asks for, Serif Labs has knocked it out of the park with a very versatile and professional grade software at a price point that is overwhelmingly fair. For me and many others using this software in a game development production environment, the implementation of .TGA, .DDS, and alpha channel access would be the ultimate win. Trust me when I say, I want Photoshop CC off my system as soon as possible and Affinity Photo is this close to making that a reality.

The .TGA format still has a very strong following in the game industry, especially when dealing with older game engines and their respective development environments. Additionally, there are a wide number of texture manipulation applications there have a strong emphasis on older file formats such as .tga. You've also hit upon an important point about what I consider a glaring oversight in the way AP handles channel information. There is no direct way to paint or paste directly into a layer's alpha channel. I can only assume that customers that use AP just for photography might have no need for alpha channel manipulation. Which brings me to my next point. Does Serif Labs have no desire to make customers out of those of us in the 3D and game development industries? If they have a number of customers asking for a particular feature that would help their work in those industries, wouldn't they benefit financially from implementing those requested features? I have seen a number of posts in the forums requesting .TGA, .DDS, and alpha channel access. Some of those threads are quite long. I'm adding my voice to that request list. I was happy to purchase Affinity Photo when I discovered it. I will be happy to purchase version 2 when it comes out. Many of those I work with are thrilled to be using AP in their workflows. So all I can say is this: "Serif Labs, please implement .TGA and .DDS export. Please let us manipulate our image alphas. This is a customer request. Thank you for your time and consideration." Mind passing that along to the developers? Thanks.

I can't help but wonder what the reason is for them not to include the Targa format. Perhaps because it is technically a proprietary format from TrueVision / Pinnacle? I don't mind using .TIFF at all as it supports and acts very similarly to .TGA but with better compression fidelity. However, I'd just like to remove the conversion step from .TIFF to .TGA in an additional external app by having Affinity Photo export in the .TGA format. Unrelated: The new 1.7 update is fantastic. Speed, efficiency, and optimization is glorious!

First off, let me say that I love, LOVE Affinity Photo. Serif has made an incredible application that made moving away from PHotoshop CC so very easy. I typically use AP for working with textures in a 3D modelling and texturing workflow. A number of other applications that I use rely heavily on the Targa (.tga) file format. With Affinity Photo, I must currently export the texture I'm working on in a file format that supports an alpha channel, import it into another application, then export it again as .TGA. Is there any way we could see a .TGA export feature soon? I know AP allows me to import targa, but I would love to be able to export it as well without having to use another app. Please keep up that amazing work you've been doing! I can't praise you guys enough!