I want to convert from a RGB PNG (transparent) to a CMYK TIFF (transparent). Currently when I do this it converts to a flattened tiff file… loosing the transparency in the process….
Am I doing something wrong?
The way Acorn (which is built on MacOS imaging frameworks) handle images is that it can only have a max of 4 channels. So when you convert from RGBA (the A is “alpha”, which is used for transparency) to CMYK, that doesn’t leave room for a 5th channel, which is where the alpha would otherwise be stored.
I’m curious what the alpha channel would be used for in your situation? CMYK is generally used for printing, and I’m not sure alpha could be useful there?
thanks,
-gus
For countless years I have been in the Adobe ecosystem. A number of years back we switched over to Affinity and have not looked back. For the most part we have made a clean break from Adobe -but we still need to keep photoshop going for a few things. Retrobatch has allowed us to automate a lot of the processes that Photoshop droplets used to do, Retrobatch is extremely fast…. Affinity has played nice with most everything of Adobe but there are instances where a .PSD file will do weird things-displays are often hidden in the application, etc.
Affinity can use masks efficiently and we have done that, but now we have to carry to images (JPG and the MASK)… more to think about and include in the over file sizes in the project.
This has caused us to use a transparent CMYK tiff, replacing the PSD all together. However, we still have needed photoshop to create the RGB PNG into a transparent CMYK tiff file. The transparent CMYK TIFF files can have lossless compression and color integrity are maintained. Makes for a smaller file size than a PSD.
So that’s the story in a large nutshell.
Is there a reason you can’t use RGBA tiff files?