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Feature Request - Alpha Channels (AGAIN!)


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  • 1 month later...
On 6/1/2020 at 1:43 PM, kirkt said:

You're welcome.  It has taken me a while to get my brain around how channels in AP work and redo a lot of muscle memory from using PS for decades.  I still use both applications, and I understand how you feel!

kirk

@kirkt thanks for sharing the detail on the technique. I’ll come back to this thread as an excellent reference if needed. This illustrates very well something that is very common for those newly adopting Affinity Photo: While many of the features and capabilities in Affinity Photo have virtual equivalents in Photoshop, some features or tasks actually require very different approaches. With some exploration and better understanding of the software, we can usually find methods that work very well, and sometimes even better than the methods in Photoshop. Thanks again. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

So honestly, this is nice for but it really doesn't solve much. Let me put this example in here:

I want to create an alpha channel that will be used inside another application for something other than transparency (texturing of 3d objects). The alpha channel becomes something more like grayscale data and can be used for many different things.

The issues comes in when Affinity Photo applies it as transparency (aka the composite alpha). Ok no problem, make the composite alpha white and just add a spare channel problem solved...

...except that it isn't.

The spare channel doesn't get saved in PSD or TIFF and if you use the affinity layers other apps cannot read them. If you apply to a mask or composite alpha in order to keep it readable in the file, then the other apps read it as transparency rather than an alpha channel which completely wrecks everything.

It would be fairly simple to just include alpha channels in TIFF files the way everybody else does it, no need for proprietary affinity layers that nobody else can read. Please fix.

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You can load the spare channel (alpha) to its own pixel layer and export the AP file to a PSD.  Then, in PS, copy and paste that layer into a new alpha channel in PS.  This way the alpha in AP does not get premultiplied into the composite in AP and stays separate, on its own layer, for export to PS.

Kirk

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Thanks for the reply but I dont want to purchase Photoshop for my team just for one thing or really adding any software in the pipeline for simple tasks complicates everything. It would be such a simple revision of their code to enable the saving of alpha channels the same as everyone else. This is true even if they didn't want to change the way the masks or composite alpha works. 

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