protoloss

My class of future game artists was baffeled when I showed them how poorly Affinity Photo performs at channel packing and alpha channel editing. The disappointment was huge! Almost all of them were interested in Photo and heard a lot of it. Most of them even considered buying it, but after this class... I fear they won't. It's so damn frustrating! There are so many good things to say about Affinity! Look at the fonts, brush packs! Layouting! Vectors! It really drives me crazy that this key feature is so completely messed up! tl;dr: It's January 2021 and Affinity Photo still excludes VFX or game artists from properly editing RGBA channels.

I think we all agree on that channel editing needs to improve in Affinity. Just image you could select a b/w layer and then copy paste it into all channels! This thread non existing because it just works! No hate, no nitpicking! Just love and happy accidents in the alpha channel.... Have a nice weekend guys!

Oh, I just came across this: and this https://affinityspotlight.com/article/jarek-majewski-game-development-is-hard-prepare-for-a-lot-of-work-and-dont-be-discouraged-easily/ Obviously not meant for game dev....Please, fix the Alpha Channel

You have to erase and paint in the alpha channel instead of painting with black/white (like in the rgb channels). If you blur in the alpha channel the values are interpolated between 1(=white) and 0 (=No information in the channel = black). This is why the blur brush works. If you dodge or burn on the other hand, you add information to the alpha channel (= white). The key is, that both brushes (dodge and burn) alter already existing information/color/pixel. So if your alpha channel is completely black nothing will happen. And if the channel is filled with white nothing will happen too, because you are adding information to information (=White). It is just misleading and annoying to show us black and white colors, because technically the alpha channel works completely different than the rgb channels. You really have to think like a coder if you want to work with the alpha channel in AP And by the way: All the 2D illustration and painting packages I have used so far (except for PS) work similar to AP. If you want to create a mask or transparency in other packages, you have to erase in the mask. Photoshop is the only software that allows you to use black and white directly in the alpha channel. I think, when they started designing AP/AD they went with what everyone else outside of Photoshop does: Erase and paint in the alpha channel. But knowing this doesn't really help because channel editing in AP is just a mess. I have no insights, but the feature really feels like tacked on. And, after they have realized that a lot of people actually need channel editing they had to perform some stunts to outsmart their code.... Tl;dr: Channel editing in AP is like writing your name using your feet Please, Serif....fix it!

Yeah, It is really sad, because Affinity is almost there.... You can easily access and work with the RGB channels and then pack a TGA Texture for your shader. As long as you only need three channels, everything is fine. The alpha channel is used for transparency? You are still good to go and can create a TGA and use all four channels. Your problems start as soon as you want to pack all four channels into a single texture and your alpha channel is not used for transparency. If you have noise textures in your RGBs and your alpha has a circle shape, your noise textures in the RGB channels inherit the information from the alpha channel and will then be reduced to that circle. The remaining info of the channels are lost if you then export your file as a TGA. It would be nice to have a check mark where we can set if the RGB channels are allowed to inherit the information of the alpha channel or not. Or... Maybe this feature is already there???? If someone knows, please tell me! I couldn't find a way.

Luminosity based selection! New term learned! That really helps a lot I will try to fiddle with the Spare Channel tomorrow! Cheers!

Hey John, It's also for Mac. It's a bit hidden. Go to download and underneath the big Windows installer button you can find the link "All Download Versions". If you click that one, you can also choose Mac OSX. I spend the whole day in Affinity working with the RGBA channels. I was able to work with the RGB channels. Not as smooth as in PS but I got some decent results. The main problem in Affinity is that it treats the channels like a coder does. So we artists need to use the eraser tool in order to "paint" black in the channels. Painting directly into the channels is very easy in Affinity. But let's assume you want to bring a b/w perlin noise or voronoi texture into one of the channels. You cannot just copy the map. You have to separate the white pixels from the black pixels. I can do this very easily in Clip Studio, but I haven't figured out a way to do this in Affinity. The PS method is so powerful, because you can just copy and then paste the b/w image into the channel. It's one single step. In Affinity or any other program you need to create an inverted selection of the stuff you want to bring into the channel and then erase in the channel by pressing backspace. Which sounds easy in first place, but you will spend some time figuring out how to set up the selection. Is there a fast selection method in Affinity where a white pixel is treated as fully opaque and a black pixel as fully transparent?

Exactly the reason, why I posted. My story started with leaf textures for palm trees and ugly edges around the leaf. I use Clip Studio for most of my work and wanted to use Affinity for that. In the end I needed Krita to get the job done. In Krita just follow those steps: Create the circle. Create a second layer below the circle and fill it with the color of your choice. Duplicate the circle layer. Merge the original circle down to the color layer. Create a selection of the circle layer and invert the selection. Select the merged layer with the background color. Right click and chose Split Alpha and then Alpha into mask. This creates a mask. Select the the mask and hit backspace to remove the background. Then right click the mask and choose Split Alpha again and then Write as Alpha. Good news: Your color information are now stored! You can even save as png. Bad news: Your Background is transparent now and you cannot see or change the color easily 😜 In general: Krita seems to have some focus on game development e.g. it's easy to create tileable textures or store color information in the alpha channel. Downside: You probably have to reasign every single hot key to get an environment you can work with. And: "Working" with the "alpha channel" is also weird in Krita. I only had to create some shrubs and leaves, so using Krita was ok. But if my main job was to create vegetation on a daily basis... well... we all know the answer😉

I am art director and bought Affinity products because it can handle all the print stuff we need to do in the games biz. Like the OP I had hope to also fiddle with the Alpha and RGB channel like in PS. As of January 2020 this is still not possible. Affinity Photo is marketed as Photoshop alternative. It would be great if Serif could hold up to this. But with statements like those two above, I have little hope Serif will achieve this. It's also sad to read that Serif seems to aim for semi-professionals. Whatever a "semi-professional" might be....