About this tool
For previewing textures, posting screenshots of them, or dropping them into a document, JPG is the convenient choice: small and viewable anywhere. The texture is decoded from its DXT/BC compression in your browser; transparent areas are flattened onto white, because JPG has no alpha channel.
About the formats: DDS (DirectDraw Surface) is the texture format game engines and modding tools use: Skyrim, Fallout, GTA, Unity, Unreal, and countless others. It stores GPU-ready, block-compressed pixels (DXT1/DXT5/BC7) together with a mipmap chain, which is exactly why ordinary image viewers and editors cannot open it without a plugin. JPG (JPEG) is a lossy format built for photographs. It compresses aggressively, produces small files, and opens on every device ever made, but it cannot store transparency and each re-save costs a little quality.
How to use it
- Drop your DDS files into the box above, or click to browse. Nothing is uploaded.
- Adjust the options if you want; the defaults suit most files.
- Click Convert to JPG and wait a moment.
- Download the results individually or all at once as a ZIP.
Questions
Should I pick PNG or JPG for a DDS texture?
PNG if you plan to edit the texture or need its transparency; JPG for quick previews and sharing.
Which DDS formats can be opened?
DXT1, DXT3, DXT5 (BC1-BC3), ATI1/ATI2 (BC4/BC5), BC6H, BC7, and the common uncompressed layouts such as 32-bit BGRA/RGBA. Both classic and DX10-header DDS files work.
What about mipmaps, cubemaps, and texture arrays?
The full-size base level is converted. For cubemaps and arrays, the first face or layer is used.
Why does the transparency or color look strange?
Games often store non-color data in textures: specular or roughness in the alpha channel, or two-channel normal maps (BC5) that appear red and green. The conversion is correct; the texture simply was not a picture in the usual sense.
Is it free, are files uploaded, which browsers work: the general questions are answered once for the whole site.