Ok thanks !
And this is why the Photoshop example is lacking - many times I have wished that whne working with PS I could also reroute elements ala blender’s node system. I think that Photoline is supposed ot have something like this.
I know that is almost off topic, but I had to comment that I hope for the future of Adobe that they employ a node editor as well as the normal layer dialogue.
I’m thinking GIMP supports PSD and ORA, and i thought that its possible to convert images by commandline with Gimp.
So there might be a simple way to do this.
Also thinking about those open formats, it isnt that long ago that png wasnt seen by all web browsers.
Since the ORA is open, i think that if your a photoshop cloud registrar; then maybe fill a bug or feature request there.
Actually i dont think it would be a lot of coding work for the people who develop photoshop to add ORA format, its not something that has to be re-invented, like an alternative to Xvid decoder or so.
How is it going with the patch? 
Well, I got it to a somewhat working state, though there is a lot of rewriting and cleanups to be done. There is no I/O just yet, first need the clean the mess, but for the ones who can build Blender and who’d like to give it a shot you can get the source from here: https://github.com/diekev/blender/tree/image_layers
Bare in my mind that this is definitely not a priority for me, so development might (and will) be really slow. (I also have a life, and my own pet projects 
).
Thankyou for the effort though, and I will see if I can teach myself to build now
Thanks for replying and sharing 
Thanks for the effort 
I m having a problem downloading from the link above when i use
$ git clone --recursive + https://github.com/diekev/blender.git
I can download almost everything but about the end, i will be asked to add username and password, I enter mine but it got rejected 
Is there a way to upload it as a patch in blender project phabricator?
I would love to help with this but unfortunately I’m lost when it comes to coding 
I really hope some of the dev’s take a look at this 'cause layers in texture painting would really be something.
If you already have a git clone of the main Blender repo, what you can do, iirc, is to just checkout my branch from there:
git checkout -b image_layers
git remote add diekev https://github.com/diekev/blender.git
EDIT: git pull diekev image_layers
Almost everything went well then i got this:
$ git checkout -t diekev/image_layers
fatal: Cannot update paths and switch to branch ‘image_layers’ at the same time.
Did you intend to checkout ‘diekev/image_layers’ which can not be resolved as commit?
and in the image layer directory i have this:
$ ls
CMakeLists.txt D458.diff build_files extern make.bat source
COPYING GNUmakefile doc intern release tests
Well, I did not remember correctly, the last command should be “git pull diekev image_layers”.
It seems like i m still having problem, this is what i got:
$ git pull diekev image_layers
fatal: ‘diekev’ does not appear to be a git repository
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.
even when i put the backlash like this $ git pull diekev/image_layers I m still getting the same result
What does “git remote -v” return by you? If what it returns nothing does not contain “diekev” then it wasn’t added (through “git remote add…”).
I just tried again with the command from above, and it seems to work, here. Maybe also reverse the order of the first two commands.
Also, I did some cleanup, and improved performance a bit, so I’ll push those changes in a bit.
I m having this:
$ git remote -v
dievkev https://github.com/diekev/blender.git (fetch)
dievkev https://github.com/diekev/blender.git (push)
origin git://git.blender.org/blender.git (fetch)
origin git://git.blender.org/blender.git (push)
I m guessing that i m having some access right issue.
Can you come to the IRC tomorrow? It is getting pretty late here and i have a meeting in the morning
Sure. There is typo in the remote “dievkev” -> “diekev”, or use “git pull dievkev …”.
just make an addon that opens and saves ora files. That would be a great start - once tested we will then proceed to porting it to other layered file types.
Any addon that is capable of saving to a layered format would be better than having no addon.
ora is better than xcf or kra, because it can be opened in krita, gimp and mypaint.
It is a better start than doing a PSD file format, because it is better documented and much clearer to implement than psd.
One you have it, blender will be capable of saving to and reading from layered image format. People who use photoshop exclusively will still be able to open the file in any of these open source apps and convert it to a psd.
Further down the line someone will use the code of this addon to write one for psd… or perhaps someone will make an addon for photoshop to make it support ora files (adobe wont be happy about that - if they allow it at all).
In any case if you continue to do adobe’s work for them (supporting their file type exclusively), ora will never have a chance in becoming a true viable alternative to psd.
Here is a early image_layer build windows 7 64bit. For now the implementation is on the uv/image editor in the T-panel, don’t use the n-panel in UV/image editor Blender will hang. Test it and give feedback here.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B62B6BmVbltVUk01WG5fTEI3UjA/view?usp=sharing
I love you too remember to love KWD as well