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Photoshop plugins: preview mostly transparent/checkerboard


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Hi,

 

When running - any - of my Photoshop compatible plugins the preview in the plugin shows a lot of transparency while the active image is a normal background layer photo without transparency.

Any way to get rid of this?

Other than that the plugins work fine and the set effect is rendered properly in Affinity.

 

Roberto

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Hi Roberto1972,

 

There are several Photoshop plugins that do not work correctly in Affinity Photo and for them to work correctly in Photo they will need to be modified by the manufacture of the plugin.

 

If you can let me know the plugins that you have I can confirm if they are compatible with Affinity Photo.

 

Regards,

Darren

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Hi Darren,

 

Al 64b plugins I have installed are:

 

• RC filters (Russel Cottrel plugins - http://www.russellcottrell.com/photo/RCFilters.htm):all freeware

• Richard Rosenman (www.richardrosenman.com): all freeware and commercial LensCorrector Pro

• The Pluginsite plugins by Harald Heim (www.thepluginsite.com): all freeware and commercial products.

• Namesuppressed filters by Kohan Ikin (www.namesuppressed.com): commercial Softener.

• Xero plugins (http://www.xero-graphics.co.uk/ - not existing anymore but still available for free online)

 

The plugins mentioned above show the semi-tansparent preview and all are developed with FilterMeister (developer Alex Hunter - www.filtermeister.com) with a side note that Harald Heim has been going his own way by having expanded the original FilterMeister code; he used to co-develop FilterMeister.

 

Additionally I have installed:

• Filter Forge (www.filterforge.com)

• Topaz (www.topaz.com): Topaz DeJpeg 4

 

However, these are just plugins sending the image to a stand-alone program and with filter effect applied back to the host (work fine)

 

NOTES:

• FilterForge apparently has contacted Serif for solving Filter Forge compatibilitybut they never received a reply: they still are eager to hear from Serif and ask for a 'NFL' license, whatever that is. And they ask for FilterForge to be recognized as a 'known' plugin.

• Serif contacted Kohan Ikin from namesuppressed according to Kohan and he admitted he never got to replying back.

 

Related correspondence in other group:

Harald Heim wrote:

I just tested the latest FM64 version in Affinity Photo and it indeed has a semi-transparent preview. The preview image is mixed with a checkerboard background. The black areas in the preview image are 100% transparent whereas mid gray areas are 50% transparent and pure white areas are fully opaque. So it seems that Affinity is using one of the image channels as the alpha channel when displaying the preview. This makes it quite hard to see the actual effect in the preview. So I would not declare any FM plugin to be compatible with Affinity.
 I just checked my plugins again and they work perfectly fine in Affinity. So it seems I made some adjustments to my code in the last eight years (no ideas which ones) that avoid the transparent preview problem. When applying my plugin on a layer with transparent areas, the transparent areas are black in the preview instead of showing a checkerboard as in Photoshop, but that is more or less OK. 
 Another problem is that the plugin dialogs with standard Windows controls have no visual styles, so they look as under Windows 95-2000, which is a bit antique. Next month I will be adding skins to all of my plugins, so that should fix the problem for me. I will probably even add an new Affinity skin.
 
Kohan Ikin replied:
That's the bug I'd encountered with Affinity Photo as well. It seems to 
be an Affinity bug though, the same FM plugins work in other plugin 
hosts, and it reminds me of a bug Corel had (in X3, I think). Apparently 
Alien Skin plugins still have the transparent preview issue.
 
I'm sure they'll get it working eventually though!  But it does sound 
like they need some help & feedback from developers.  (I have an email 
from Serif that unfortunately I haven't had time to get to yet, as much 
as I really want to help them.)
 
Obvious is that with the corrupted semi-transparent plugin preview in Affinity the use of plugins is totally ehh.. useless :-P
The effects render properly but one hardly can see what they are setting in the plugin.
 
Oh, something likely related: when running a FilterMeister based plugin for a second or next time I often get the error message at plugin startup: Aborting X86_call_fmf1 - - code not valid.
So it seems all plugins suffer from a FilterMeister - Affinity compatibility.
Clicking away the error message the plugin works fine, though (apart from the preview issue).
 
Slightly off-topic: I don't know what it is with transparency and other image format issues: I remember having had quite often exporting an image in one image editor (or downloading from the web) and opening it in an other image editor then colors might be inverted, only white background becomes black or transparent areas are rendered black or white.
Indeed, like Kohan noted, particularly Corel products long time suffer(ed) from incorrect colors (exporting or importing - I don't know where it goes wrong). I'd think image formats have been WELL defined for quite some time.
 
Roberto
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