Converting to Targa/TGA

Can anyone recommend a solution for converting JPEG, XAML or PNG files to TGA format? I'm using some of the newer Microsoft tools (including Expression Design which I love) and Targa seems to have been abandoned as an obsolete export format.

Why can't SL provide import of non-TGA format for clothing textures, and do the conversion (if really necessary) themselves?

Dont know about the other formats but the GIMP will convert jpeg to tga.

www.gimp.org

Any decent raster editor will convert JPEG and PNG to TGA (as well as just about every other image format you could think of). This includes the three most commonly used programs, Photoshop, Painshop Pro, and GIMP. If you're looking for just a straight batch converter with not much other functionality to speak of, you might want to check out Irfanview.

XAML is a bit of tougher order. I believe there are plugins for Photoshop and Illustrator to export XAML (the PS one might also work in PSP and/or GIMP), but I'm not sure there are any for importing XAML. It's just not a format that graphics professionals tend to use.


Sounds like typical MS, trying to force-feed their stuff to the public. "Who cares what people actually want? They'll take what we give them and that's that." When something has been in existence as a standard for decades, like TGA has, MS seems to have a habit of all of a sudden deciding they should try to change it. I think their reasoning is "Why let people continue to use stuff that is free if we can try to kill it and then make money off whatever we put in its place?" Personally, I find it funny how they never seem to catch on to the fact that this strategy almost never works.

That attitude, combined with the fact that the company has a long history of producing the absolute worst 2D graphics applications on the planet, pretty much ensures that Microsoft will never have much of a presence in the graphic arts industry. Adobe, Corel, and others will most likely continue to beat the pants off them for decades to come.

Sorry to say that, since I know you said you like Expression Design. I certainly don't want to tell you you're wrong to like it, so I hope it doesn't sound like that. For what it's worth, I'm not a die-hard MS-basher by any means. There are plenty of things I feel they are very good at; it just happens that making tools for serious artwork isn't one of those things. I think the history speaks for itself, and your current TGA predicament is just one more page of it, but you're welcome to disagree.


SL has been able to import PNG for some time now. I still recommend TGA in most cases because alpha transparency offers much more control and is usually much faster than simple transparency. But if you want to use PNG, you certainly can.

Ok, it does do batch, and very well (and single conversions very well, including lossless jpeg conversions), but where do you get the idea that is all it does?

Basically, it is a viewer and converter with some limited editing ability, some built in editing (some of which is limited, but some that well and truly beats Photoshop, for example the resize options can give you much better quality), and a variety of filters (including using photoshop filters, at least).

Lets see,

Great batch conversion, as you mentioned.
Can load, view (single and thumbnail), convert and save almost *any* type of graphic file (not just limited to the current directory, but can do all subdirectories as well, for me, that is a god-send).
Some editing, some GREAT, some so-so.

Opps, I almost forgot to mention, it is small, fast, and free.

(On a side note, if you know of another small, fast and free image viewer that is better than IrfanView, it *must* be able to read camera raw files, and do all of the above, then *please* add it to this thread, as I would be interested to check it out!)

Since Ifranviewhas already been mentioned, Vectoreye works good for Xaml.
http://www.siame.com/ is the link to get it.

Ok, I can see how my having said "no other functionality to speak of" could have read as "no other functionality, period". That wasn't the intended meaning, of course. The phrase "to speak of" was meant to indicate that there is more there, but it's not quite relevant to the discussion at hand. Had I meant there was no other functionality at all, I would not have used the qualifier "to speak of"; I just would have said "no other functionality." I can definitely see how people might not get that though, so I've edited the post to replace "no" with "not much" to make it more clear. Thanks for pointing out the confusion.


(And please, let's not get into a discussion about the number of functions it takes to graduate from "not much" to "much". I'm speaking relatively here. A full fledged image editor like Photoshop can do millions more things than Irfanview can do, so BY COMPARISON, Irfanview can be described fairly as having only a few functions. My car can do a lot of things too, for a car, but compared with, say, a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, the car only has a handful of functions. Fair enough?)

lets not forget the client supports png now, so if your application is giving you guff about TGA...

Paint.NET is free and free download. Very nice program. It aims to be a MSPaint replacement, but it has lots of photoshop features.

paint.net hasnt worked its way into my work much, but from what i have used it seems to be a good - free program, that reminds me of older paint shop pro

hehe thread derailed. so anyhow back to the TGA problem

I was using macromedia at first until i got tired of the fact no one else used it which made it a bit harder when learning new tricks and so instead of continuing with fireworks etc I switched over to photoshop BUT before that I was having to convert TGA files from PNG because at the time we could not import PNG's

I used gimp and made it into a tga there although thinking back on it that was stupid beacuse I could have used infraview but totally forgot about that little application..

I"m allergic to microsoft however so i wont give you my opinion of them leaving out a very common file usage ^^

before that I used corel and still would be if i had not discovered macromedia ^^

Better? Dunno, but I like XNView http://perso.orange.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enxnview.html

Have you tried FastStone? Free and does many things!

http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF and DNG).