AcidArrow

Quick alpha edits are a pain, quick RGB edits when alpha is present are also a pain because Affinity might destroy RGB data if the alpha dares to have zeros in it. I understand workarounds exist, but I'm not going to add 10 steps to what should be super simple. As it is now, opening a .tga file with an alpha, doing a quick color adjustment and saving -> results in RGB data loss, unless I add 10 more steps. As it is now, opening a file with an alpha and wanting to do a quick couple of brushstrokes in the alpha channel and save, is impossible, unless I add 10 more steps. I consider the current behaviour a bug, there is such thing as buggy design. But sure, let's call it a feature request, it's semantics. The thing that is 100% sure is that this is a problem. Because otherwise, they might as well add a section to their docs called "How to deal with the alpha channel" that just has a link to photopea and nothing else.

PhotoPea on the left, affinity on the right. Both are showing the red channel. Affinity apparently destroys the color data immediately upon loading. I can open a tga with alpha in affinity, do nothing, save, and the color channels will have changed drastically. This is a bug, it needs fixing.

I would like to add, that while the workaround existing is nice, it is a hard sell to anyone wanting quick and easy alpha editing. I tried to workaround, it's nice, but I still open photopea to edit my Alphas. For whatever it is worth, the alpha editing issue is the one thing that is stopping me from openly and freely suggesting Affinity Photo to other gamedev people. And I don't think linking them to a tutorial when they ask if you can edit alpha maps is doing affinity any favours (it makes the software seem a lot more complicated than the competition, and that's not really true).

I haven't bought v2 yet, has anything else about alpha handling improved? ( I hate how it's impossible to make affinity treat alpha channel like "just another channel" ). It's one of the reasons I can't commit to Affinity Photo for all my work. It feels silly to do 90% of my work happily in Affinity and the open a web app like photopea.com so I can do some basic alpha channel editing. With the normal map editing obviously throwing a bone towards game dev / cg artists, easy alpha editing is MUCH MORE of a must than normal map tweaking.

So, actually, the issue is different affinity keeps flipping the colors of the corners? It's weird. Here's an older version of the file, on the left it's open on xnview on the right it's open in affinity, you can see affinity added that discoloration in the corner where there was none. You can download the file below. OrangeTransLM.tga

That's not how the file was created. The tga I upload was loaded and saved a bunch of times by Affinity photo, the weirdness you see may be a result of Affinity saving it upside down each time. Exporting as any format other than tga exports the data correctly (the same as what I'm viewing in Affinity photo). Tga always flips it. Copy and pasting into a new document and then exporting to tga, again flips the results.

Exporting a small (16x16) tga file, results in the file getting saved upside down. You can even see in the export preview that it's upside down. This is super bizarre to me, and suddenly I feel uneasy about having edited so many files with affinity recently, although it definitely doesn't always happen, since I would have noticed. Not sure what is special about this file. To repro, open the test.tga file, then just export as tga and hit preview. I'm using Affinity Photo 1.10.4.1198 on Windows 10. test.tga