I was looking into the BMP file format a bit and it seems that Windows officially only supports BMP version 1 (Compression = 0, RGB, no Alpha) and BMP versions 4 and 5.
Casey uses version 3, which I do understand how it works and that's the version you would want to use for uncompressed, RGBA pixel formats, but since it's not officially supported I am wondering which applications do officially support it to create images like that?
Adobe Photoshop seems to work for some people, but not everybody. Casey is using GIMP which is fine, but what do artists usually use? Do artists create images in different file formats and I'd have to use GIMP to convert them?
This all sounds a bit nit-picky, but are there other, uncompressed RGBA file formats that are as easy to read as BMP? PNG uses compression so that makes it a bit harder to read/write from scratch.