Convert PSD to PNG from Command Line

By  on  

I've been fascinated by basic image manipulation these days, which led to my Get the First Frame of an Animated GIF with ImageMagick and How to Create Screenshots in Firefox posts.  It was brought up in a comment to the Animated GIF post that ImageMagick can also export an image from a layer Photoshop PSD file.  They were right!

From the command line, you'd execute the same command:

convert 'website-design.psd[0]' website-screenshot.png

This time you cite the PSD file and voila, an image is created in milliseconds.  Sure you can manually do this within Photoshop or create a macro to do so, but if you have loads of Photoshop files you want to generate screenshots for, ImageMagick is gold!

Recent Features

  • By
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

  • By
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS calc

    CSS is a complete conundrum; we all appreciate CSS because of its simplicity but always yearn for the language to do just a bit more. CSS has evolved to accommodate placeholders, animations, and even click events. One problem we always thought...

  • By
    Event Delegation with MooTools

    Events play a huge role in JavaScript. I can't name one website I've created in the past two years that hasn't used JavaScript event handling on some level. Ask yourself: how often do I inject elements into the DOM and not add an...

Discussion

  1. Innnnteresting. This is probably a stupid question, but do you need Photoshop in order for it to export?

    • Jules Verne

      You need photoshop to create the image.

      Image magic is a complete separate tool

    • Jules is correct; you don’t need Photoshop to complete this.

  2. That’s amazing. If the above question is stupid, then this definitely is:
    How can ImageMagick decode the PSD at all if PS isn’t installed? Are PSDs packaged with some non-proprietary method? Like XML for layered images?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!