Support of Photoshop Clipping Paths? Yes? No? Sometimes?

[Joachim_L]

AFAIK Affinity Photo does not support clipping paths (Beschneidungspfad in German, don't know the appropriate translation to English). At least it seems so, when I open a PSD with a clipping path in APh. And I am not talking here about vector masks which work with APh.

To my surprise APu does understand clipping paths when I open an IDML. I saved a simple Indesign file as IDML, unzipped it and looked through all the XML files in there. In Spreads/Spread_ucf6.xml you'll find the clipping path coordinates.

I am no programmer, but it appears to me that the path information is somehow saved along with the PSD and Indesign is able to extract it and write it to IDML. Is this information so deeply locked inside the PSD, that APh is not able to extract it? Preserving /understanding clipping paths in APh would be extremely helpful, because I have tons of PSD files with clipping paths and opening all files and creating a vector mask for APh is no joy.

[Fixx]

6 hours ago, Joachim_L said:

it appears to me that the path information is somehow saved along with the PSD and Indesign is able to extract it and write it to IDML.

I think that ID reads clipping paths and internally treats them as picture frames (there is a separate option to convert clipping path to frame if editing is needed). Thus clipping path data in IDML would be Publisher readable frame path.

[Joachim_L]

5 minutes ago, Fixx said:

I think that ID reads clipping paths

That's the point ... the clipping paths must be saved somewhere inside the PSD.