Why doesnt Painter support *.png ?

[workbench]

Probably has to be with the way Painter handles layers.

[Stinkfist]

Since PNG is a "flat" format much like TGA or JPEG, I dont see how layers could affect things? I tried to get in contact with Corel about this but obviously, they're not able to give anything beyond basic help, not answering questions about why exactly this format is unsupported.

[workbench]

I was thinking more in the way that layers in Painter work, the canvas can't be transparent like in PS or OC, if you load a GIF with a transparent color it will display white, I guess they could load PNG the same way as GIF files load (ignoring transparencies), but I don't see what's the use if Painter doesn't display transparencies.

[pming]

Hiya.

"...but I don't see what's the use if Painter doesn't display transparencies."

For folks (like me) who don't use Painter primarily for "2D illistration stuff"; I use it for texture creation for 3D (games and animation). With games, a lot of the time the game engine will need seperate textures for different effects (diffuse/color, transparency, bump, normal-map, parallax, etc.). So, while it would be nice to have one format where you can have a layer for each type of map you need, when it comes down to using them, each texture map has to be it's own file.

Ex: "wood_dif.png", "wood_trans.png", "wood_bump.png" for the main diffuse/color, transparent and bump map textures.

[Ghiangelo]

Fireworks uses .png files as it's default format and they are layered files with all the great layer attributes too (including some similar to Corel Photo-Paint). unfortunately Photoshop doesn't support Fireworks' .png layers and tends to open them as flattened files.

the cool thing about the .rif file is that it's one of the oldest formats still being used. it's also a multimedia format.

[martinsdesign]

I think layers in a .png is a Fireworks only hack and not a .png standard feature.


Try to work with .psd or .tiff (I think) for layers.

[pete]

it is a pain in the arse that there's no png support! I't messes up my workflow a fair amount, but I usually have photoshop open at the same time and do my painting in painter and extra tweaks in photoshop. (then save it from there)... Not the ideal situation though...

[Stinkfist]

I was thinking it might be a legal issue in that Corel doesnt want to support a free, non-proprietary format like PNG, but Corels other image processing programs support *.png dont they?

[genocell]

....but Corels other image processing programs support *.png dont they?

Yes. I have Corel Photo-Paint X3 and it supports PNG. It also supports .rif but strangely, can't save to .rif, only opens it. Wierd.

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