Better support for TGA format

[Evehne]

Hi, I'm a texture designer for video-games and I'm having a very big problem when it comes to switching to TGA format with Affinity Designer.

Indeed, the proposed format is always heavier than what can be obtained with Photoshop or in conversion with XnView. Besides, I have to continually export to PNG then reconvert with XnView to TGA with RLE compression and the possibility of changing the color format to 16/24Bits.

Apparently the TGA used in Designer is always uncompressed 24Bits. Which is really restrictive... Designer is ultra-productive but output formats such as TGA have no options which requires the use of third-party software to do the work... 🥺 

exemple : colored 256x256 Texture test

XnView TGA RLE-z  24bits + no MetaDatas = 135.79KB = Really Good
PhotoShop TGA RLE-z 24bits = 145.59KB = Good
Designer TGA (no options) Uncompressed 24bits = 192.04KB = ... Not good

Why doesn't Designer provide any options for TGA ? Would it be possible one day for this format to be correctly supported ? at least RLE compression ...

Thank you for any feedback

[Evehne]

Hello there ? I'm alone to use TGA format ? XD

[fde101]

The TGA support is just about useless for its intended purpose anyway.  The main reason people kept begging to get it supported and the main case that was made for it was for unpremultiplied alpha.  The problem is that the Affinity software behaves as if the image is premultiplied internally, so the color data is already lost when the alpha channel contains a zero, and there is no way to get it back for export - thus no matter whether the exported image is premultiplied or otherwise, there is no way to treat the alpha channel as an independent layer and preserve the image data in the other three.

This just about wipes out the value that is typically cited for using TGA.  Suggest just using PNG or other superior format unless and until this is fixed, but if the Affinity raster engine is indeed premultiplied internally, fixing this may be a fairly significant effort, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

[Evehne]

1 hour ago, fde101 said:

The TGA support is just about useless for its intended purpose anyway.  The main reason people kept begging to get it supported and the main case that was made for it was for unpremultiplied alpha.  The problem is that the Affinity software behaves as if the image is premultiplied internally, so the color data is already lost when the alpha channel contains a zero, and there is no way to get it back for export - thus no matter whether the exported image is premultiplied or otherwise, there is no way to treat the alpha channel as an independent layer and preserve the image data in the other three.

This just about wipes out the value that is typically cited for using TGA.  Suggest just using PNG or other superior format unless and until this is fixed, but if the Affinity raster engine is indeed premultiplied internally, fixing this may be a fairly significant effort, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

This is not really the request, the basis being that if a format is supported in export, it is that it is correctly supported and in particular RLE compression in the TGA Format .
It's as if we didn't offer compression in JPEG and we had to record everything at 100% quality ... or if we couldn't do 8-bit PNG...

If you have to do something, do it well, if not, don't do it.