I suggest to have a PNG option for the FPO setting slider to enable a seamless working with assets that do rely on transparency.
Use-case:
FPO Renditions for InDesign Asset Link are OOTB only available as JPGs. This file format does not meet the needs of modern print media production workflows, since images rely more heavily on transparency settings instead of cutting paths. This change is not very new and i have seen companies made that switch from cutting paths to transparency back in 2010. This makes JPG a suboptimal choice for FPO renditions since this format is not capable of containing transparent pixels. The picture would be flattened on a white background.
Current/Experienced Behavior:
FPO is simply not an option on every asset that has a transparent background. This goes for pretty much every single product picture within our AEM. Since the setting is applied via Folder setting, we have to manualy delete the FPO renditions on assets that need its inbuilt transparency to be able to layout correctly in InDesign (since JPG does not hold any transparency) and to make things worse - this increases the loading time significantly for bigger print media cataloges, since InDesign will load the orignal files into the cache every time the user checks out the cataloge. We are talking 10Gig every single checkout. To make the FPO a good thing - it needs to have more options than just JPG.
Improved/Expected Behavior:
Give users more than just JPG as a FPO format. I suggest PNGalpha since it would meet the transparency criteria, yet there might be some additional things i don't have on my radar.
Environment Details (AEM version/service pack, any other specifics if applicable):
This has been reported to the engineering under the internal reference ASSETS-36085. The product team will triage this request to verify feasibility based on the prioritization model. This post will be updated according to the Jira request status.
Hi @kautuk_sahni , I would like to add, that this feature will make a huge difference for AEM asset link / InDesign users.
HUUUGE difference I might not be able to speak for every InDesign user and every company, yet I am very confident in saying: Having a transparency within the tiff files, for product pictures was a industry standard in every company I had the pleasure to work with for at least the last 15 years. Some might be still using paths to make a clean cut, but this stems from a past limitation within the printing process concerning transparency.
So a FPO setting that uses JPG (which can not contain transparency) will makes the FPO rendition a bad option for print media design within Adobe InDesign.
Our current situation is, that we had to seperate product images that contain transparency in a folder that does not create a fpo rendition - and checking in and out an InDesign file that contains a lot of product pictures is a big stuggle - a bottleneck in the production workflow. The system needs to cache up to 20gig for a big product catalog - and it has to re-do this every time the cache gets emptied.
