nicknack23

Wow, thank you so much @Sigurd! So if I'm reading your code right, it seems all Adobe did in the new Liquify file format is to scale down mesh width and height by a factor 4 (each) and implemented a simple compression scheme that skips consecutive zero displacement vectors at the start and end of each line. And to compensate for the lower mesh resolution, displacements are stored as double precision floats instead of single precision. Is that correct? Do you know what width2, height2, width3 and height3 represent? They seem unused in your code. Would you like to share what competing app you're developing? Looks like Javascript so I'm guessing a web app. Great work and thanks again for sharing!

Hey pyrochild, I assume you didn't manage to crack this since I haven't heard anything. But I'm going to need to look into this myself, so please let me know if you made any progress at all that could give me a head start. For example, any thoughts on what kind of compression Adobe is using to get such large compression ratios (see my previous post)?

No problem. I made three PNGs of various sizes and used the "push brush" twice in Liquify to make simple test meshes. Dimensions are in the file names. The resulting zip file is too big to attach (still only 1.4 MB), but here's a link to Mega.nz: https://mega.nz/#!We5QkARI!2-qD_qK2e8ADnYJcT578x9RxXo4uvBH0rXeDPeR-pRU I understand there are no promises when trying to reverse engineer something, but thanks a lot for trying!

Photoshop has changed the file format of .msh files created in Photoshop's Liquify. The newer .msh files are much smaller (50-300 kB) compared to the original .msh files which were often 15+ MB each. Probably Adobe is just compressing the old files, but I suspect the compression is lossy because of the massive reduction in file size. The old larger files can still be imported in Photoshop but can only be saved in the new smaller format. What this means is that Paint.net's Liquify is now only partly compatible with Photoshop's. Meshes created in Paint.net can be imported into Photoshop, but not the other way around. So I'd like to know: will the plugin be updated to read Photoshop's newer format? And in any case, would anyone be willing to speculate on how the new meshes may be being compressed? That could help any reverse engineering attempts ...