Working with channels

[Ocean Quigley]

Hello,

 

I'm a game artist, and the main thing preventing me from switching from Photoshop to Affinity is that we use channels (R, G, B, A) differently than you probably expect. We basically need direct access to every channel (including alpha) as an individual editable, grey-scale image. Each channel holds distinct texture data that we feed to shaders.

For example, I often need to tweak the levels on just the alpha channel, or invert just the R channel. 

This is doable in Affinity, but it is very cumbersome. In particular, the way that Alpha is always displayed as layer opacity makes it almost impossible to treat the alpha channel independently from R, G & B. Alpha often holds data that has nothing to do with layer transparency.

 

To enable game artists to use Affinity, we need access to all of the channels and the ability individual manipulate them.

 

Thanks!

Ocean

Edited January 27, 2018 by Ocean Quigley

[hrondleman]

+1 for manual channel editing

Again, technical artist. For debugging/writing shaders I need to be able to create textures with independent channels especially for combined maps.
Often it is necessary to use only certain channels (for example Normal map only use G and A channels as they are the least compressed in DTX5, then swizzled back in the shader, or in Unity a Metallic smoothness map uses G and A each for different greyscale data)