Ability to export 16bit Greyscale for Height maps

[McGergs]

Currently the tool always exports RGB textures. Is there a way to make it export to Greyscale? Right now when dealing with Height maps for UE4 I cannot use this tool because it always outputs RGB and Unreal only take Greyscale for Height maps.

[fcamarlinghi]

Hey! I'm going to post the same reply I sent you by email here since it's been a few days and I haven't heard back from you.

I've done some more digging into the 16bit area (admittedly it's been a while since I had some time to dedicate to the plugin), but unfortunately it's still as I remembered: the API that Expresso uses to retrieve layers from Photoshop only supports a 8bit RGBA format. By the look of things, it's unlikely that Adobe will ever update the API to support additional bit depths as it's been this way at least since 2016. As such, I'm afraid it's not possible to export 16bit images with Expresso.

Something that might be possible would be exporting 8bit grayscale images, but I'm unsure as to whether or not that would be useful at all (especially since it will require rewriting large portions of the exporter code that now work on the assumption that input and output are RGBA, with the risk of breaking existing functionality).