About this tool
DDS textures come straight out of game files and modding tools, and Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.NET, and Windows Photos cannot open them without a plugin. This converter decodes the GPU compression in your browser and hands you a lossless PNG with the alpha channel intact, ready for editing, previewing, or sharing.
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. PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a lossless image format with full transparency support. It is the standard choice for screenshots, logos, icons, and anything with sharp edges or text, but it produces much larger files than JPG or WebP for photographs.
How to use it
- Drop your DDS files into the box above, or click to browse. Nothing is uploaded.
- Click Convert to PNG and wait a moment.
- Download the results individually or all at once as a ZIP.
Questions
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.