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Affinity Photo - Replace Adobe


alt3rn1ty

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Serif Affinity Photo - No need for Photoshop.

I am no longer keeping Adobe Photoshop and its damned subscription going .. Step asside Adobe and make way for :

Affinity Photo, currently just shy of 50 of your english pounds - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/

It was only available for Mac, but now is available for Windows, and its superb - Dont just take my word for it, here are some reviews ..

http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/software/graphics-and-media-software/image-editing-software/serif-affinity-photo-1295010/review

https://www.softwarehow.com/affinity-photo-review/

 

And check this getting started video out, it has some features that are frankly amazing

https://vimeo.com/channels/affinityphoto

 

It imports .psd files

 

Plugins : They are coming, a few are supported already but the main one we are interested in is ..

Intel Texture Works plugin for all the new DDS texture formats ..

Sadly at this time its on the developers to-do list, so could be a while.

 

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So what to use to export those BC7 Linear fine textures in the meantime ?

Save your texture image out as a lossless format ( say .png ) from Affinity

Now please do not laugh, Paint.Net now supports all the new DDS formats if you use this plugin https://github.com/0xC0000054/pdn-ddsfiletype-plus

Seriously, when you go to Paint.Net "Save As..", use the drop down menu to select DDS2

Now you can save textures and generate mipmaps in all the new Intel Texture Works formats, from Paint.Net.

If the image you load is Lossless format, and you dont do any editing in Paint.Net, just save it out as whatever dds format you need and the whole procedure is as good as if you used Photoshop to edit and export your dds texture.

 

Note, when Paint.Net saves the dds file, it will give it a file extension of .dds2, just rename it to .dds and it will work fine

But also note, if you try to load up say a BC7 texture into Paint.Net, rename it to have a .dds2 extension again, and Paint.Net will now Load it.

 

Paint.Net now comes with the above linked plugin as part of its standard installation ( in C: \ Program files \ Paint.net \ Filetypes \ ), but the GitHub page I think is getting updated faster than newer versions of Paint.Net, so manually overwriting the same three files with these is easy enough to do.

So good resource file for your texture image, edit it with Affinity instead of Photoshop, save your image in a lossless format.

Load it up in Paint.Net, then "Save as" DDS2, select your format, generate MipMaps etc.

Rename the file name.dds ( removing the 2 )

Y38cz3j.png

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The Paint.Net plugin has been updated, new release 1.7.1 has changed a couple of the dialogue options names to make it more like the options in the Intel Texture Works plugin ..

https://github.com/0xC0000054/pdn-ddsfiletype-plus/releases

 

Quote

Added 'Linear' to the non-sRGB format descriptions.

Renamed the BC7 Compression Mode Quick and Max values to Fast and Slow.

 

"Slow" (previously Max) is the only difference, which now equals "Fine" from Intel Texture Works I think.

vtYt6yG.png

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  • 7 months later...

This is a lovely find from a Google search. I just downloaded a free trial on the recommendation from some other gaming friends. I'm excited to try out Affinity Photo. :)

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