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TARGA file please?


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19 hours ago, nFF said:

So yes, wish list item, add alpha channel on import for TGA/TIFF

Affinity Photo support TIFF import/export with alpha channel.

test.tiff

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+1 for TGA+Alpha import/export support. Again, working in the games industry it would be very helpful to have a TGA export, while it is possible to convert, it does become tiresome when trying to adjust a texture to look correct. Having to convert a texture every time it is exported can be a large time waster.

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On 1/29/2018 at 10:26 AM, MEB said:

TGA format has now alpha import support in Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.6.1 - Beta 3).

 

Great! This is a step in the right direction! I still think it would be worth the short development time of adding the TGA exporter (for batch resizing, edits, etc. while retaining the format). Plus another use case for game artists is using TGA to contain up to 4 grayscale maps (RGBA) as masks for use inside of Unreal 4/Unity materials. 

 

Keep up the great work!

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Quote

 worth the short development time of adding the TGA exporter

 

They might do it. But from what I have read from the developers in this very thread, seems that wouldn't require a short development time...

AD, AP and APub. V1.10.6 and V2.4 Windows 10 and Windows 11. 
Ryzen 9 3900X, 32 GB RAM,  RTX 3060 12GB, Wacom Intuos XL, Wacom L. Eizo ColorEdge CS 2420 monitor. Windows 10 Pro.
(Laptop) HP Omen 16-b1010ns 12700H, 32GB DDR5, nVidia RTX 3060 6GB + Huion Kamvas 22 pen display, Windows 11 Pro.

 

 

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  • 5 months later...
  • 1 month later...

This is incredibly unfortunate. Was evaluating affinity photo to replace photoshop as a game developer. Half way through pitching it to a colleague, I couldn't find the TGA export. (I assumed there would be one). Needless to say, it's not happening. I was just going to move on, but I really love the short time I've spent using Affinity and started wondering how many was in a similar situation and instead of posting here, just moved on. I'm open to us switching to new formats, and maybe once that happens, we might be able to consider Affinity once more. Until then though, I'd like to throw my hat in for supporting it as well.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/28/2018 at 11:24 AM, telemax said:

Affinity Photo support TIFF import/export with alpha channel.

test.tiff

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

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  • 1 month later...
On 9/13/2017 at 5:37 AM, MEB said:

Hi wtoddp,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

There's no plans to support alpha channels in Targa (TGA), sorry. This is an old format that's barely used nowadays except in very specific areas.

Very narrow one sided view there... The "barely used nowdays" and "specific areas" are leaving sideways an industry that surpasses Hollywood: Videogames 
Reminds me of the comment "Nobody plays single player games anymore". Careful with what you say or you might lose customers. I highly suggest to add that export functionality or you might lose the "very specific areas" customers to other software out there plus the bad PR that that might bring. In all honesty I only work with targa files, and I can't really recommend Affinity to my colleagues if it will make their work harder and they are itching to ditch photoshop. 

 We are loyal to whoever or whatever makes our work easier; Having to use a third party application to convert the files to targa is adding more work to my process making me slower. Please, adding that file format should be a piece of cake for your devs. 

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On 9/13/2017 at 6:37 AM, MEB said:

Hi wtoddp,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

There's no plans to support alpha channels in Targa (TGA), sorry. This is an old format that's barely used nowadays except in very specific areas.

Sorry, but that's so wrong...

It's WIDELY used in game development, which doesn't look like a small market share...

Sorry, that's simply wrong.

Please support TGA export.

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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.

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AD, AP and APub. V1.10.6 and V2.4 Windows 10 and Windows 11. 
Ryzen 9 3900X, 32 GB RAM,  RTX 3060 12GB, Wacom Intuos XL, Wacom L. Eizo ColorEdge CS 2420 monitor. Windows 10 Pro.
(Laptop) HP Omen 16-b1010ns 12700H, 32GB DDR5, nVidia RTX 3060 6GB + Huion Kamvas 22 pen display, Windows 11 Pro.

 

 

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  • 1 month later...
  • Staff

@Lurky

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums :) 

If this is all you are waiting for to stop subscribing, then just save as PNG and add an extra step and convert to TARGA (using something else (for now)).

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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  • 2 months later...
  • 2 months later...

Posting here to add my voice to this. Targa export is the one thing preventing me from spending money on y'all. And no, I'm not going to save as PNG (which has poor support for non-transparency-driven alpha channels anyway, which is one of the main issues) and use a 3rd party app to convert because why would I spend money on a program that...  doesn't do what I need it to do?

+1 to needing Targa export (with alpha channel!) support.

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  • 3 weeks later...

+1 too, I've read your threads about TGA and it's just disappointing regarding how it's of course widely used (an uncompressed source file format with RGBA fully editable...it's vital to game devs and not only to be honest)

I understand that you might prepare this feature for the next update (you'd be fool not to do so guys) but whether it's an easy or hard to code feature, you will really benefit of its adding (it will really make Affinity a better alternative than photoshop, cause except this hassle you've largely surpassed this old software ;))

As a workaround you can still launch a 3D painting software (let say 3DCoat) and share your layers with it, when you're okay just export in TGA from 3DCoat or whatever is your software of choice. For all VFX masks and stuff you can use a plane as your UVs source so you won't lose pixels that doesn't belongs to an UV island

Hope this will help some of other users

(and really stop consider TGA as the last unwanted feature, most users pray for it !)

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I too would love to see TGA support come to Affinity Photo. The program is really great and my #1 feature after 1.7 would be to have TGA export support still. As others have mentioned I primarily use Affinity products for game development/creation and sometimes I need the direct TGA output. I am fine using 3rd party PNG to TGA converters but I do hope one day I won't need to anymore (for sake of workflow and speed) and Affinity can have the built in export function with alpha and 24/32 bit options.

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • Staff

All,

I came across this thread again whilst browsing the feature requests forum today.

I need to know more about the alpha problems people describe with PNG before we can decide whether or not to do TGA export.

Essentially, it sounds like PNG is no good for you because we (everyone?) premultiplies alpha through the RGB channels when exporting it. If that's the case, we would happily add a switch to export straight alpha in PNG.

If there is something more which PNG literally cannot provide then we will consider implementing TGA export. If not, you guys really should be asking whoever makes the software that you need TGA for to implement PNG / TIFF import.

Our policy with I/O has generally been to import as many formats as we can, but only export formats which are currently widely used and not just less efficient duplicates of each other. TGA is a fairly rustic thing internally - both PNG and TIFF are supersets (feature wise, to my knowledge) and superior in pretty much every other way. 

Thanks,

Andy.

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39 minutes ago, Andy Somerfield said:

All,

I came across this thread again whilst browsing the feature requests forum today.

I need to know more about the alpha problems people describe with PNG before we can decide whether or not to do TGA export.

Essentially, it sounds like PNG is no good for you because we (everyone?) premultiplies alpha through the RGB channels when exporting it. If that's the case, we would happily add a switch to export straight alpha in PNG.

If there is something more which PNG literally cannot provide then we will consider implementing TGA export. If not, you guys really should be asking whoever makes the software that you need TGA for to implement PNG / TIFF import.

Our policy with I/O has generally been to import as many formats as we can, but only export formats which are currently widely used and not just less efficient duplicates of each other. TGA is a fairly rustic thing internally - both PNG and TIFF are supersets (feature wise, to my knowledge) and superior in pretty much every other way. 

Thanks,

Andy.

The .TGA format is still used widely in the game development industry. This is especially true when regarding older engines still in use by a number of game dev studios. I get that folks using products such as Affinity Photo are using it for, well, photo manipulation. If that's all Serif wants Affinity Photo to be, then it's understandable that implementing .tga export and better alpha channel control isn't necessary.

But then again, wouldn't Serif love to have additional customers, in game development, attempting to move away from Photoshop find a home with Affinity Photo? Wouldn't that also, may, just perhaps convince them to make use of the other Affinity apps such as Designer (for creating UIs and such)?

Most of our management team and product research team at our studio do not relish the the monthly outlay of money to maintain multiple Photoshop CC seats. Affinity offers a superior product at a vastly superior pricing model. Those of us that have adopted Affinity Photo out of our own pockets, who also see the need for .TGA and better alpha channel control wouldn't be asking if .png and .tiff did what we needed them to do. This is a matter of not only workflow speed but also the need for legacy file format interaction.

Lastly, and this is important, most of the other products used with legacy formats such as .TGA also do have .PNG. and sometimes .TIFF import. But when you state that we should hit up a number of multiple vendors and tell them that their apps all need better PNG and TIFF support, it kinda comes off as dismissive. Those of us, in a number of other threads in the Affinity forums no less, who use Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are asking that our image editing app of choice (read: Affinity) export .TGA so we can use them with a host of other apps.

Allow me to furnish an theoretical situation. Say we have 12 other apps that use the .TGA file format. Management doesn't wish to spend money purchasing licenses for a number of other apps for updated or "superior" file formats. Doing such would seriously impacted limited funds. Along comes an image editing app that represents as a real alternative to a subscription based software. Management thus concludes that purchasing 15 seats / 15 licenses of Affinity Photo and Designer would be far more cost effective in the long term. The Affinity apps need just two things to be viable for that. those two things are .TGA and alpha channel manipulation.

The funny thing about the above theoretical situation is that this actually happened. 

So look at it this way. It's a win for Serif to be flexible with their exportable file formats. Serif gets even more customers moving away for your competitor and those same customers get a more feature complete application for use in their professional field.

I love Affinity Photo. I will keep using it every single day. Just please take a moment and ask the Affinity development team to put this request into the Affinity suite.

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There are also cases I need TGA output becasue the game I am working on only has tools that allow TGA file conversion to the native game file texture. If Affinity Photo is able to allow TGA output with 24 and 32 bit +Alpha option it would make the workflow a lot easier for sure. I would prefer to not have to export from Affinity and use 3rd party programs to then convert a Tiff or PNG to TGA, especially if I am actively working on a file in affinity and need to output a TGA multiple times.

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49 minutes ago, fde101 said:

According to the PNG standard, the alpha channel is NOT to be premultiplied in a PNG file - if everyone is doing that, they are all doing it wrong:

https://www.w3.org/TR/PNG/#6AlphaRepresentation

From what I see in pngs exported from APhoto  alpha is NOT premultiplied.  Same as from Photoshop.   So no need to do anything.   

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