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Greetings, I wonder if you can help me with an Affinity Photo or Designer issue with the PSD file format. I have the need to have other apps to open PSD files when called for an external editor to make changes and save. I tested the settings by making Affinity Photo and then Affinity Designer as my external editor of choice, but the PSD “layers content” keeps getting deleted when I save the file from within Affinity Photo or Designer. Take this one example with an animation app that I use to create characters with PSD file layers. I have to use the PSD format so that the app updates my characters properly. The app is called “Cartoon Animator 4”. WITH PHOTOSHOP CS6 When the animation app opens the PSD file in Photoshop CS6, all layers remain intact after my updates to the file and I hit save. When the PSD file gets updated in my animation app, all layers are there including my changes. Everything looks very good as it’s supposed to, since all I am doing is working with the PSD file and saving it. Nothing difficult. WITH AFFINITY APPS However, when the animation app opens the PSD file in Affinity Photo or Designer ( when I use any of these as my preferred PSD file editor ), all layers look fine when it’s opened in Photo or Designer, until I save it. When the PSD file gets updated in my animation app, all layers contents are NOT there, except for the one on top of the group. The layers content that were there got DELETED by AP or AD. Can this be a big bug in Affinity Photo and Designer with the way it handles PSD files? I am hoping it is a fixable bug. I really don’t want to go back to Adobe products. I haven’t used or opened Photoshop CS6 in two years and I thought I already made the full move to affinity products, but now, I don’t know what to think. Please see attached screenshots demonstrating what is happening. Thank you in advance for your help! Best regards, Bill

Hi there, We are (unfortunately) stuck with a PSD workflow here, and will never be able to change away from that. Although Affinity Photo generally works well with PSDs, unfortunately there seem to be two very severe bugs with it where, for some reason, it only saves layers that are marked as visible. This leads to a ton of lost work. Here are explicit repro cases for both bugs, both of which are 100% reliable on our machines with the default settings for Affinity Photo: Bug #1 - General PSD export bug where layer existence is saved, but layer contents are lost Create a new file. Create two pixel layers, A and B. Draw an "A" shape on A, and a "B" shape on B. Set A to visible and B to invisible. Use File->Export to save to a PSD with the default settings. Close the file with File->Close Load the file with File->Open and note that although layer A and B both exist, layer B's image is gone (it is an empty layer). Bug #2 - Save-over-imported bug where both existence and contents are lost In General preferences, turn on "Enable save over imported PSD files". Create a new file. Create two pixel layers, A and B. Draw an "A" shape on A, and a "B" shape on B. Ensure both A and B are set to visible. Use File->Export to save to a PSD with the default settings. Close the file with File->Close Load the file with File->Open and note that A and B both exist and have their proper contents. Set layer B to invisible. Save the file with File->Save (automatically overwriting the old PSD) Close the file with File->Close Load the file with File->Open and note that while A still exists, B is now completely gone - it does not even exist, let alone have pixel data. Based on this behavior, it would seem like there is perhaps some kind of hidden option (or one we missed?) that tells the PSD export process to skip things which do not contribute to the final image. We would suggest that this should, at the very least, default to "off" if it is going to be an option :) - Casey

Two critical bugs when exporting a file as a PSD file. 1. Any layer marked hidden in Affinity Photo shows up in the exported PSD file as empty. 2. In the exported PSD file, all layers are clipped to the size of the canvas in the Affinity Photo document. The first bug can be worked around by unhiding the layer before export. A pain but doable until fixed. The second bug is fatal. We are looking at buying about 10 licences to deploy Affinity Photo to our team but we have to maintain compatibility with Photoshop as some work will go outside where that is their design package. So any layer that extends beyond the canvas in a document is rendered useless by Affinity Photo clipping to the canvas. This means we will have to look for an alternate application. Which is a real frustration as AP does so many things so very well. Can you hyper-escalate this bug to the development team and provide some kind of workaround in the interim? By the way, importing of PSD files—some with some pretty esoteric filters, adjustment layers, masks, etc.—works very well in Photo. Kudos for that guys. Affinity Photo 1.7.3 on macOS 10.14.6.

It's the same issue as the beta https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/76752-photoshop-export-hidden-layers-are-empty-in-psd/ 1. Whenever I tried to export hidden layers, they become blank (as in the image gets replaced by a blank pixel data). I'd like to also add that 2. exporting also deletes the empty folders which are important for some program parsing of data (which I think has something to do with the #3) 3. I noticed that file size doesn't change whether Don't Export Hidden Layers by Export Persona is toggled on or off (Just pointing out, maybe this is related to the bug)

As seen in this thread https://forum.reallusion.com/413757/03-Tips-Tricks?fbclid=IwAR2INglDGheWz9ai4L5aE0zMWh8cr1RmHoiv1xGbCrDtFRMNCppeJ4c7B50#bm423087 there seems to be an issue when exporting to PSD. Is this something Affinity would address?

I am using PSD format for exchanging images and with latest beta found a bug in PSD export: In resulted PSD all layers, that are HIDDEN in original AP file - all of them are completely empty. They are here, they are named properly and stay on right hierarchy place - but fully transparent, no pixels in them. Layer, that was visible in original AP file are exported as usual, with all pixels This happens with all 3 PSD export presets