MattyWS

Thanks! At the risk of going off topic from this thread, I know there are plenty of work arounds using multiple softwares, but surely Aphoto, the application literally made for opening, editing and saving images should be able to do that basic function. But right now what you have if you want to use tga is the ability to open, edit and... Not save. Extremely basic functionality that I paid for the software for (which admittedly didn't think was going to be a problem since I assumed it was basics). And the stance right now by the devs is they don't really care about it. And then you get the defensive people coming in and saying "use all these other applications to convert" - but I shouldn't have to for something that basic. Obviously tga support is one of many, many features people want and need and I understand there may be limited staff working on lots of other things. I praise Serif for affinity photo as I truely do like it. I feel my fight to get TGA sport is being met with a wall of negativity with devs even basically saying "no one needs it" apart from the huge games and tv industry... I'm not really sure why there is so much resistance to the idea of adding basic functionality to save files in commonly used formats... I feel that kind of "nah, you don't need it" attitude really gets under my skin a little... It's not just me asking for this simple feature, there's whole threads on it. I'm not a horrible person I swear! :p I sound like I'm angry ranting but all I want is for the software to improve and become more useful, and to be able to confidently tell people "hey, use this awesome new application if you don't want to use Photoshop". Heck I could use gimp, I'm not going to because I subscribe to CC and I paid £75 for APhoto so either way I can do whatever I need. I'm not reliant on APhoto So everything I say really is just me trying to help improve the software. On that note, I can't make the switch from Photoshop yet knowing there's a few missing features with no work around that doesn't involve using random other software... In that case I'll stick to Photoshop where I can do all the things I need in one application instead. I'm eagerly looking for reasons to make that switch though as many other people are. I have the money to keep paying for Photoshop no problem but I do believe they take advantage of the situation by being the dominant application with no real competition, charging a lot of money where they shouldn't. I'm hoping Aphoto will be the competition we all need.

That's curious. I have a very similar machine to yours, 32gb ram, GTX 1070, 1tb SSD for my main hard drive with another 1TB HDD secondary, i7 7700k though which probably only out performs yours by a tiny percentage. running W10 My start up time for affinity is 4-5 seconds. Photoshop is a fraction less but I'm always working with my applications open all the time anyway I don't deal with RAW images so I wouldnt know for sure how that is. Again dont deal with RAW. I tried cropping just now and no freezing. God forbit I ever use the magic wand unless it's to select solid colours which works instantly (like a colour ID map for example). 'Quick selection' tool, I couldnt find one under the name but if it's what i think it is I dont use that either. Refine Edge is also not something I use. No crashing and no delays or pauses, the little preview thumbnails in layers seems choppy to update but that doesn't really affect me. I may sometimes use tweak layers like contrast, hue/saturation etc and make the odd manual tweaks to my textures. While working at Rare I mainly had to work in photoshop to texture stuff and when I tried affinity for the same thing (hand painted texture work) affinity performed well IMO. Alas, every texture at Rare are saved out as PSD for storing the data and TGA for the game engine. I can say the same for the majority of companies I worked at other than TT Games, which sort of used their own file format and heavily relied on scripts in photoshop to save out to the engine. Hence why I'm a heavy advocate for TGA support. in my whole career I've used TGA and I've worked at 4 different studios. The alternatives if I had to use Affinity are PNG (aweful alpha editing and bad results in game anyway, non existent alpha channel editing) and TIFF which isnt supported in Unreal.

Oh of course my UI layout is intentional, photoshop it set up the way I'm comfortable and if my needs are the same, I may as well set my layout the same too. I'm not sacrificing anything by customising my layout to what I like Mind you, photoshops layout in that screenshot is minimally changed from the default but that is the layout I've slowly come to over 15+ years of using it, removing what I don't need and adding what I use the most. Anyway, I Don't think of Aphoto as a clone but I do think they're both made for the same job, so of course they will be compared, users will replace photoshop with Aphoto with the intentions of only using one or the other. People will expect to be able to get the same results out of both applications even if the feature set is different. The moment one of the applications cannot get that end result is the moment the user will choose the other application instead. In my case the thing that holds me back from using Aphoto is definitely the lack of export options which should be standard feature of either one of them. I dont care if Affinity has some other tool instead of the burn tool, but what I do care about is if there is no alternative to photoshops burn tool (I know there is a burn tool, that was an example).

APhoto is awesome, it's built from the ground up and runs more efficiently and faster than photoshop, it's streamlined and simplistic. That said, while no one wants to call it a clone but... When you search for both photoshop and Aphoto, these are the first lines you get; Affinity Photo is a raster graphics editor developed by Serif for macOS, iOS and Windows. - Wikipedia Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems for macOS and Windows. -Wikipedia And attached below just for fun is a side by side screenshot of both softwares on my pc...

It's pretty useless to be able to import something but not export though. Can you imagine being able to open a .afphoto file then not being able to save as .afphoto without flattening and losing all your layers? It's kind of the same thing. Almost like having read-only support for the file format. I do understand the software is under development and I mean no disrespect but it just sounds like the devs don't want to add functionality that quite a lot of people are asking for. Saying it's not a widely/outdated used format is not true, it's pretty popular actually.

Of course in a lot of cases you'll find yourself using multiple applications in your workflow. For example I use Substance Designer and Painter as well as photoshop, you could argue all three are image manipulation applications so with my own logic I should choose one, right? The problem is they are all used in a different part of my workflow and have their unique niche uses, for example I use Substance Painter to texture my model initially, then use Substance Designer to automate any post process changes and give the model an Ambient Occlusion and heightmap, sometimes even automate an atlas texture sheet, then finally all my images are saved in Photoshop as .psd files to be saved as the file format I desire and for organisation. In this whole workflow there is only room for Photoshop or Affinity, I would never need or want to use both since they would be doing the same thing, while the other applications have some cross-over features they aren't used for all the same reasons. So Photoshop has file formats I need that Affinity doesn't (but should really, but that's another topic), so as much as I hate having to pay subscription costs for photoshop, currently I have to use that instead of Affinity. I would much rather switch to affinity photo and not be paying subscription to adobe.

Of course not but to be real, Photoshop and Affinity Photo are both intended for the exact same thing. No one wants to be using both so one or the other will have to suffice which in most cases, people will stick to photoshop because they know it well and it has more features. Some people will *replace* photoshop with Affinity Photo and those people expect to be able to get the same out of the software one way or another. Even if their favourite feature in photoshop isn't in Affinity there needs to be an alternative, non-awkward method of achieving the same results.

Thanks! That seems like such a botch fix even if it does work. I feel uncomfortable making redundant layers in my AP files... This generally seems like either a bug or an oversight, is there any chance a dev or staff can confirm if it's working as intended and if so, why?

Hey all, Not sure if this was covered anywhere but I couldn't find much on the issue. A friend of mine has a problem I couldn't help with, he wants to use Tiff with an alpha channel but it doesn't export the alpha channel unless choosing the option 'selection without background' which crops the image to the alpha channel. this is obviously bad if you need to keep the proportions of the image size, how do you export a TIFF with the alpha channel without cropping? Thanks, MattyWS

It boggles my mind there is no scripting for Photo, is there any future plans to add the feature?

I've been using Photoshop for about 15 years I think, so I'm very used to it. Now I work in game development and I've been paying for photoshop CC for years for personal use at home. I mostly use it for texture authoring and general stuff like splash screens or GUI etc. I'll always be using photoshop as work but for home use I've decided to look for alternatives to expesive software. As such, I've swapped photoshop for Affinity Photo and Max/Maya for Blender. I own All the other software I need so Substance designer/painter and Zbrush aren't a problem while Unity and Unreal are free anyway. I own Quixel Suite but that's now made redundant by switching to Affinity Photo since it heavily relies on photoshop. I have found some issues after switching to Affinity though. For starters the lack of TGA support is awkward, since for Unity you can just use TIFF format but Unreal you cannot. TGA is supported by all the software I use so building up a library of images as TGA is pretty much the standard. The other issue I came across was for modding old (20 year old) games and I'll admit this is niche but lack of indexed colour mode support makes using Affinity useless for this. I'm sure I'll come across more quirks trying to use Affinity Photo and I'm hoping the devs will listen about the image format issue but it does worry me that they say TGA file format isn't used anymore... Only by most of the game development and TV scene... But until then if I stick to Unity only I'm fine. I'd prefer to use Unreal but with Affinity Photo that's really not so easy. All in all I think Affinity products can be the future just as soon as the softwares are more fleshed out. I hope after they're done with AP they stick to working on the three products for a while and expand their company. Right now Photoshop has possibly about 17,000 more employees than Serif. Thanks, MattyWS

Very helpful thank you, a good short term solution for sure in this case. It's a big jarring to have a separate application just for a single simple feature though, if this were the case for every feature photoshop has that Affinity doesn't, people may find themselves having to install a ton of little random and potentially malicious applications instead of just using a single application like Photoshop or Affinity... And who wants to constantly be swapping applications for different features to edit an image?

+1 for indexed support. Ignoring R C-R who is completely misunderstanding and complicating the matter (it has nothing to do with saving out as jpg with indexed colours, it is opening any file, converting to indexed colour mode and saving as the file format of your choice), it would be nice to get index colour support for legacy reasons but I fear just being for legacy reasons the developers won't bother. A lot of older games (that people still mod or create content for) need indexed colour mode. As much as I'd hate to admit it for the same reasons .bitmap file format would be great. But there re far more pressing matters for the devs to focus on for Affinity Photo. I found this thread while searching specifically for this feature and was sad to see I may still have to keep photoshop around... Which defeats the purpose of switching to Affinity! MattyWS

You may have had your selection tolerance to something that wasn't 0% (20% is default) which could bleed the selection maybe? I'm also not entirely sure how the Contiguous toggle affects selection but that could also be a factor.

Fixed it, only one of the images had transparency. I flatted the image then selected the white background and mate it transparent

A png file can contain transparency information (alpha). Your pots are clearly transparent to some extent

OH! I didn't think to just type a percentage in there, that works thanks! Hidden features

Hi all, In photoshop when you go to resize the canvas or image size, you have a dropdown of options just like Affinity photo does (in pixels, cm etc), however I noticed that Affinity doesn't have Percentage option? For example, to resize to 200% (double). It's useful as you'd otherwise have to work out for yourself, which is an inconvenience (a small one maybe but annoying still). I do a lot of compare or side by side images and usually it's a case of screenshotting/printscreening two things and pasting them into the canvas, cropping then resizing canvas width by 200% and dragging the layers to be side by side. Is there a chance we can get this option for affinity photo?

That's great but Unreal Engine doesn't support TIFF.... And sure it may be on them to support an image format but quite honestly Affinity is the application specialising in image manipulation, not Unreal. They already support the most popular formats like TGA. The reason for not wanting to use PNGs with transparency in game engines is that PNG files leave a colour bleed (say a leaf using an alpha channel would have a white outline for example, which only gets worse the further away it gets form the camera as it mips). TGA on the other hand allows you to still have colour in the whole image but edit the alpha channel directly, which means the problem with edge bleeding in engines goes away since we can put that colour in the RGB channels. On top of that, the alpha channel is sometimes used to store masks or other maps in game engines too, like say a heightmap in the alpha channel of an albedo map. for VFX it is especially used since masks are put in all 4 channels of an image to be used and blended in game engines with shaders. TGA is supported by any and all applications for game development apart from Affinity... You guys are literally the only ones that think TGA isn't used anymore. I don't mean to sound rude but it is naive to think Targa won't be missed by anyone developing games. Whenever I'm asked if there's any alternatives to Photoshop I cannot recommend Affinity simply because it lacks fundamental features like saving a file in the format mostcommonly used in game development... I'm sure you guys (the devs) can all see how many potential customers you're missing out on right now because of something so simple, surely? even if for example the studio I work at now switched to Affinity you guys would make about £4,000, and it's a small studio. We'd be making a huge saving by not using photoshop so the need to switch to Affinity is most certainly there. if I were to count up the licenses required for all of the studios I've worked at in my career you'd have made ~£50,000 from them all switching. If I were to try pitching the idea of switching to Affinity from photoshop to my studio now they'd laugh at the lack of support for TGA alone. Sorry to be a downer, again this isn't a rant I just really want to support Affinity photo as a replacement to photoshop but currently cannot. Thanks, MattyWS

If I could direct a question to the staff, what is keeping Affinity Photo from saving to Targa? It's a widely used format in games. The closest thing is a PNG but in photoshop, that has issues with transparency and colour bleeding since you can't edit an alpha channel directly with a png. With Targas people are able to retain the colour of the image and edit the alpha channel instead. This may be a photoshop issue but the fact remains that TGA is now most popular in game development. It can't possibly take that long in development time to add such a simple feature for an application that's only real job is to open, edit/create and save images. I'm just curious as to why such a simple and very much needed feature is being pushed aside as I've seen for a few years now that people have been asking for tga support. I have experience in most applications for game development including game engines, however my current workflow uses Substance Designer/Painter, Photoshop, Zbrush, Maya and Unity/Unreal. The only formats that I ever use is .obj and .fbx for 3D, PSD and Targa for 2D. Occasionally png for 16 bit support (heightmaps mostly). I've worked in 3 different studios over my near 7 year career and I can confirm so far that everywhere I've worked use Targa as the main texture image format. So foolish me for buying Affinity Photo without first checking for this feature, but I really would like to switch from Photoshop to Affinity on my home pc because I cannot justify spending money every month for photoshop when all I need is the ability to open/edit and save textures. This isn't a rant by any means, I would just really love to see TGA support asap.

Hi, new here. Also work in game development and am trying to switch to Affinity from photoshop on my personal PC at home, however lack of TGA support is criminal! Please look into support for TGA. I would almost be ok with .TIFF format if Unreal engine supported that.