DDS to PNG

DDS, the DirectDraw Surface format, is how many PC games store textures: compressed in GPU-friendly block formats, often with a full chain of smaller mipmap levels. Modders, 3D artists and curious players who want to look at or edit these textures quickly find that normal image viewers cannot open them. This converter decodes DDS textures and saves the full-size image as PNG in your browser.

Supported compression formats

The common block formats are covered: BC1 (also called DXT1), BC2 (DXT3), BC3 (DXT5), BC4 (ATI1) for single-channel masks, BC5 (ATI2) for normal maps, and BC7, the high-quality format used by most modern games. Uncompressed RGB, RGBA, luminance and luminance-with-alpha textures work as well. Files with the newer DX10 header extension, which BC7 requires, are read too.

How block compression is decoded

GPU texture formats split the image into 4 × 4 pixel blocks, each stored with a few reference colors and per-pixel indices. The decoder rebuilds every block exactly as graphics hardware would, following the well-tested bcdec reference implementation. The resulting PNG shows the texture as the game renders it, including any compression artifacts present in the original.

Mipmaps

Most game textures include mipmaps: the same image at half, quarter, eighth size and so on, used for distant objects. The converter takes the top level, the full-resolution image, and the result note tells you how many levels the file contained. If you edit the PNG and need a DDS again, your texture tool can regenerate the mipmaps.

Normal maps

BC5 textures typically hold normal maps with only two channels, X in red and Y in green. On its own that looks like an odd red-green image. The converter reconstructs the Z component into the blue channel, so the PNG appears as a standard tangent-space normal map ready for editing in any image or texture program.

Alpha and masks

BC2, BC3 and BC7 textures can carry alpha, which may be real transparency or a packed mask such as gloss or emission. The PNG keeps it unchanged. In an image viewer, a texture with a mask in alpha can look partly transparent; that is the data, not a conversion error.

What is not supported

BC6H, the HDR block format, cannot be represented in standard PNG and is reported as unsupported. The same applies to signed BC4 and BC5 variants and some rare uncompressed layouts. Cube maps and texture arrays are not split into faces. In each case the tool tells you the format it found, which helps you choose a different converter such as Microsoft texconv.

Practical uses

Previewing textures from a game folder, making reference sheets of a mod’s assets, extracting artwork for wikis, or converting textures for editing before packing them again with your modding toolkit.

Finding the textures

Games rarely leave DDS files loose. They are usually packed in archives such as BSA, BA2, PAK or VPK, and modding communities provide unpackers for each. Once extracted, the files can be dropped here directly, many at a time.

Privacy

Everything runs in the browser, so game files and unreleased assets are never uploaded.

Related tools

For Targa textures, use TGA to PNG. To check the color channels of a texture separately, Split RGB Channels shows red, green, blue and alpha as individual images, and the Image Resizer scales textures to new sizes.