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For me bitmap and bitmap screen settings are an invaluable part of use in screen printing. It’s how I take a clients beautiful gradient and make the separations for the different screens to develop for printing. Effects and similar don’t quite work because the bmp just shows black or white, which give me a cleaner screen to print with. (Effects often have greyscale or anti-aliasing that can muddy a phot emulsion screen. 

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@pon

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums :) 

2 hours ago, pon said:

Why serif needs application list? 

WINDOWS OS needs BMP!

 

Please search "*.bmp" on your windows.

Are you making BMPs yourself for use on your own Windows PC? If not I do not understand why you think BMP are needed in Affinity. I think there is a big difference between supported by PCs and needed. What are you making BMP files for, and what are the ones you make needed for? That was the point of our enquiry, whether our customers make them for a specific purpose, not if they exist.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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Since we are still being asked, I’ll recomment with my usage being microcontrollers and pax handsets etc

To extend on this, in some cases they also require various bmp settings (2 bit etc)

I find it odd so many other weird formats are supported, but a classic format is still not supported after years

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  • 1 month later...

+1 for bmps here, The creatures series of game utilizes bmps shoved into a container, all the company made tools all default to bmp and will only read bmps. Not having an extra step on windows would be great(folder actions on mac do me no good)

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 12/3/2017 at 7:33 PM, Kip said:

I would also like the option to export .bmp!! I use AP to develop automation graphics for industrial process control systems and several of the industrial displays (e.g. automation direct) will only accept bmp as a file source. I get by converting with paintbrush, but would love to eliminate the extra step.  

This is the exact reason I need BMP support. I used Photoshop for 15 years and just switched to AP. Hit this snag today. C-more HMI.

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  • 3 weeks later...

For some reason, I can do this in Photoshop and many other "lesser" programs.  I also need this capability, as it is a format that game artists use or have to use often enough.  It shouldn't be a question as to why we need it at this point, but that it's a requested feature over the years and should be easy enough to implement.

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  • 2 months later...
On 4/5/2020 at 9:55 AM, Mark Ingram said:

We do import BMP, and for exporting there is often a better format to use than BMP. Do you have a list of applications that only accept BMP files?

As I see this topic is still unsolved as of Nov. 2020, here’s another urgent vote pro BMP.

This is not an application but a use case only accepting BMP:  As far as I know it’s the only format allowing me to place the same graphic file multiple times into the same print layout (Indesign so far, on my side, because of clients’ needs) and assign different colours and tints to each of them – exactly the way I assign colour to a line of text. It can be a huge time-saver not having to create lots of different-coloured TIFFs when colour is the only factor that differs between them. – Or are there other, Affinity-supported file formats that would do the job? I currently don’t know any.   

Christian W. (Germany)

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6 hours ago, Christian W. said:

As I see this topic is still unsolved as of Nov. 2020, here’s another urgent vote pro BMP.

This is not an application but a use case only accepting BMP:  As far as I know it’s the only format allowing me to place the same graphic file multiple times into the same print layout (Indesign so far, on my side, because of clients’ needs) and assign different colours and tints to each of them – exactly the way I assign colour to a line of text. It can be a huge time-saver not having to create lots of different-coloured TIFFs when colour is the only factor that differs between them. – Or are there other, Affinity-supported file formats that would do the job? I currently don’t know any.   

Christian W. (Germany)

I can't see why that would be specific to BMP? Have you tried PNG?

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BMP is by no means a dead file format. It is still in use - and more importantly - was widely used at all levels in society.  It is an easy format to support - and an important format. 

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000189.shtml

Quote

LC preference:  When digitizing collection items or acquiring born-digital pictorial content, the Library of Congress prefers TIFF_6, JPEG 2000, DNG, or JPEG. The Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statement (RFS) includes BMP as a preferred format for photographs in digital form and other graphic images in digital form. The RFS does not specify a version of BMP.

One day in the year of 2120 Affünity Photo v1.0 from Sherif Tacoware in Hottingnam can't open or save to legacy formats like JPG, PNG or TIFF. It will also not support .afphoto files.

People - isolated from history - will start to eat bats. Suddenly one gets a fever...

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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13 hours ago, Mark Ingram said:

I can't see why that would be specific to BMP? Have you tried PNG?

Of course I did. But please have a look at the attached screenshot: These different-coloured images are all the very same BMP file, also attached (it’s pure black when opened in an image editor – but for the layout program it’s just pixels vs. transparent, I’m free to define the colour there). And when I save this as a PNG, it will always load as black into Indesign, no chance to modify the colour there. 

(Edit: try placing any image format into a layout document, then select the frame’s content. Then try editing the fill colour of the content. To my knowledge, this will always be greyed out – unless you place a BMP file.) 

At least I haven’t found which settings to use when saving as PNG to achieve the same effect. If it’s possible I’d be too glad to learn.

Anyway, thanks for listening – I appreciate that!  

bmp multicoloured.png

Ohne Titel_b.bmp

Edited by Christian W.
clarification of process
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1 hour ago, Mark Ingram said:

Thanks @Christian W. - it looks like the BMP is 8-bit, have you tried exporting a PNG with similar settings? This will output an 8-bit PNG.

 

Hi Mark,

thanks again. I’m getting closer with PNG but am not quite there. With the presets from your screenshot (8bit, grayscale palette, transparent background), the resulting PNG is flat black, no transparency. (#3 in my screenshot.) Setting the background, in the PNG presets, to white results in a usable image, though without the option to edit fill colour. (#2.) The desired effect is almost there when I export with white background and 1bit depth, here I can apply fill.1087350680_ScreenshotatNov1215-12-16.png.55dec138fccb20f5374085c58070ed46.png The result is quite dirty though, see all those blemishes where in the original file there’s all transparency, plus of course you lose all the nuances of 8bit.  

The point is with the BMP format you can use plain 1bit logo artworks as well as tone-rich 8bit grayscale images and colour them in the layout to your liking, using spot or process colours in any tint desired, and it’s always neat and clean.

Granted, there’s still a workaround using XnConvert but it’s kind of unsatisfying, I think.  

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Hi @Christian W., my point was that the feature in the other app isn't directly tied to the BMP file format, rather the bit depth of the image. I used the following setting to write the image with red text (note that it doesn't matte the image, resulting in a transparent background):

image.png

I then loaded it back into Designer, selected the image, and recoloured it via the colour wheel. Resulting in:

image.png

 

Untitled.png

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Hi Mark, 

thanks again for your efforts! Lots more helpful than what I’m used to elsewhere in the design-software business… 

Anyway to me it seems to boil down to a compatibility issue:

Using the setting exactly as you showed in your latest post, I drew two new files – the left, red one on a white canvas (then exporting to transparent), and the blue one on a transparent canvas. Placing into Indesign 2020 as well as 21 shows unwanted effects though: the red one has a dirty, shadowy background, while the blue one, even though looking good in preview.app, imports to a non-transparent rendering in the layout document. 

And worst about it is that neither can be manipulated colour-wise in Indesign.

Well, for these cases I still have the external converter option, so not too bad. (With Screenprinting it’s different, but a lot has been said about that in this thread. Need to fall back to my old PS CS6 there.)

But I liked the way you handled this, a lot. Sincerely hope to be able one day to use the full Affinity Suite in professional, distributed contexts.

png-8bit_new.png

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  • 2 weeks later...

Affinity Photo is a great app and I'm seriously let down by the multi-year arrogant attitude of the moderators who'd much rather nitpick and argue with users requesting features and talk about how they don't use BMP so nobody else does either than spend the few hours they'd need to to implement BMP export.

Edited by gtaidan
Clarification
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7 hours ago, gtaidan said:

Affinity Photo is a great app and I'm seriously let down by the multi-year arrogant attitude of the moderators who'd much rather nitpick and argue with users requesting features and talk about how they don't use BMP so nobody else does either than spend the few hours they'd need to to implement BMP export.

They are not even moderators - it is just random people from the Internet, really. Other users of the software. It is bizarre.

Still doesn't explain why Serif doesn't support a file format that is by no means dead yet.

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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Hi everyone, first time posting...

I've been researching this issue ever since I purchased the entire Affinity suite. Overall it's a very solid alternative to the old Adobe stuff that I spent my entire design career using. Unfortunately, old habits don't go away and when I heard that Affinity doesn't support 1-bit BMP files my stomach fell. For my purposes, BMPs were an essential part of my approach and whole style of design; I would use them for everything from background texture patterns, little hand-drawn dingbats, logos, and so forth, anywhere that I needed a simple one-color element with a transparent background and arbitrary spot color. The conversation seems to be revolving around PNG files instead, but I needed to know that those would do what I need them to.

Okay, so after reading the latter posts in this thread I'm satisfied that using Photo and Publisher I can create a PNG with these qualities when placed in a Publisher picture frame. So far this covers everything that I would otherwise use a BMP image for. Almost...

There's one big problem: the color displayed on the PNG is not accurate to the color I choose in Swatches. At least not reliably. Say I have a simple logo, black on white, which I drew in Photo. I export to PNG as direted, place it in Publisher, select the image, and apply, say light blue. Nope; whatever color I apply to it remains very dark, as if it's mixing with the black, and I cannot get it to show up full brightness or saturation. I try again with my PNG image red instead of black. This time, I get what looks like the real light blue, but if I try adjusting the brightness, at either end it goes to gray instead of white or black, even though the proper color is showing up in the Fill viewhole. Whats worse, it also looks like the brightness slider is affecting the hue somewhat! Okay, something is messed up here, unless there's a detail I'm overlooking. We're almost there, but not being able to control the color predictably is a maddening quirk.

The best I can do, unless I find a workaround, is to actually fill the elements in Photo with whatever color I need and export a PNG with the specific color I need. This is not ideal and I may end up with multiple versions of any given image, but at least I have transparent backgrounds...

Still, anyone who can help with this issue woudl receive my eternal gratitude. Here's the PNG I used for my test if you want to experiment.

cheers

Billy S.

hatguy test.png

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Update:

Oh. My. God.

The mysterious, inconspicuous "K only" button...I had to Google it, because it's not in the fricken manual and no one in this thread mentioned it. Of course it makes sense. K=black. Black Only. Otherwise Publisher treats it as a color image.

I believe the problem is solved, at least as far as my specific purpose. I'll keep you posted with any further observations.

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On 10/28/2016 at 5:21 AM, Dave Harris said:

I'm afraid exporting to .bmp isn't a priority for us. Just out of interest, which apps require .bmp and don't support any other formats?

FWIW I just got a client who needs me to create custom screen graphics for their Genmega ATMs, and they require 256-color BMPs. Nothing else will work.

Here it is, 4 years after you asked, and this still isn't available in Affinity Designer. I guess it really ISN'T a priority.

Funny though. I can export them in GIMP, the free image program. Luckily for me.

It makes my process more convoluted and dependent on multiple programs, but I guess that's just the way it is.

 

Screen Shot 2020-11-25 at 11.45.37 AM.png

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On 11/12/2020 at 8:19 PM, Christian W. said:

But I liked the way you handled this, a lot.

Actually on second thought, I like it not so much. See, what you told me is basically, if you can’t use the Affinity Photo output in InDesign, just switch to Affinity Publisher. That’s not an option at the moment, and probably neither for quite a while. And seriously it’s not an option for a lot of us out there, as long as compatibility between the native page-layout formats is not nearly as comprehensive as between the image editing programs. So you’ll have to convince people step by step, and suggesting currently-unusable alternatives is not too convincing, I’m afraid.    

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