Convert PSD to PNG from Command Line

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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!

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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?

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