heightmaps without Photoshop

Unity Engine
1

Tonight I was watching the live training video Terrain: Introduction to Heightmaps and much to my chagrin learned that Unity can apparently only use a Photoshop specific file format - Photoshop RAW.

Really? Surely it can use some other file format as well!

But if not, then is there any way to create files in this format without spending hundreds of dollars to get Photoshop? I really can’t justify that kind of expenditure just for creating heightmaps!

My attempts at using GIMP so far have been somewhat unsuccessful. I can get Unity to load the data, but it comes out looking like crap.

2

Only Adobe calls it Photoshop RAW, the rest of the world just refers to it as RAW.

Gimp should handle it perfectly well, take a look at this link for example http://newton64.github.io/blog/2013-07-24-gimp-unity-terrain.html