How much smaller is the HEIC?

TGA (Truevision TARGA) is a 1984 raster format that became the de-facto texture container for the game industry through the late 1990s and 2000s. Unreal Engine 4 and 5 still accept TGA as a primary texture format, id Tech, Source, and CryEngine all build pipelines around it, and Substance Painter exports TGA by default for albedo, normal, and roughness maps. The format's virtues - uncompressed 24/32-bit data and a clean alpha channel - are also why the files are enormous: a 4K diffuse map runs 48-64MB.

Converting TGA to HEIC is for everything outside the engine: reviewing texture sets on an iPad, keeping a compact reference library of finished maps, or AirDropping work-in-progress to an art director. HEVC compression collapses a 64MB uncompressed 4K texture to a 1-2MB HEIC at visually lossless quality, and - crucially for game art - HEIC carries the alpha channel, so foliage cards, decals, and UI elements keep their transparency instead of being flattened the way a JPG conversion forces. Both RLE-compressed and uncompressed TGA variants are handled transparently.

Keep the pipeline distinction clear: HEIC is a review and archive format, not an engine format - Unreal and Unity ingest TGA/PNG, not HEIC, and marketplace listings (Unity Asset Store, Fab) want JPG or PNG thumbnails. Treat the TGA as the production master, use HEIC for the humans-looking-at-pictures side of the workflow, and derive JPG via HEIC to JPG for stores and web portfolios like ArtStation that don't accept HEIC uploads.

Reasons to convert TGA to HEIC usually come down to compatibility, file-size, or specific feature requirements. Common situations:

• An app or platform only accepts HEIC uploads.
• You need a feature unique to HEIC (e.g. transparency, vector scaling, animation, multi-page pages, etc.) that TGA doesn't provide.
• You're optimising file size — modern formats often produce smaller files than the older format you started with.
• You need a single archival format across a project so files behave consistently in the same viewer.

1. Open the TGA → HEIC tool on heic.now.
2. Drag your TGA file onto the drop zone, or click Select files. You can drop a whole folder of files at once.
3. The output is fixed to HEIC. If the format supports extra options (page size, transparency background, quality, EXIF stripping), tweak them in the right-hand panel.
4. Click Convert. The job runs on our server and finishes in a few seconds for typical photos.
5. Download the result. Files stay in storage for 24 hours and are then permanently deleted.

The entire flow is free for the first 10 jobs per day with no signup required. A free account doubles that quota; a premium plan removes the limit entirely.

• Alpha survives the conversion - 32-bit TGA foliage cards and decals keep their transparency in HEIC, so no flatten-colour halos to worry about.
• Don't convert normal maps or roughness maps you intend to reuse - lossy compression corrupts the vector data they encode; HEIC texture copies are for visual reference only.
• Substance Painter exports RLE-compressed TGA by default - both RLE and uncompressed variants convert identically.
• If exporting from id Tech games, the TGA may be flipped vertically (legacy quirk) - our converter follows the TGA header orientation flag.
• For marketplace thumbnails and ArtStation, derive JPGs from the HEIC set - those platforms reject HEIC uploads.