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
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Disable Autocomplete, Autocapitalize, and Autocorrect

    Mobile and desktop browser vendors do their best to help us not look like idiots by providing us autocomplete, autocorrect, and autocapitalize features.  Unfortunately these features can sometimes get in the way;  we don't always want or need the help they provide.  Luckily most browsers allow...

  • By
    MooTools: Set Style Per Media

    I'd bet one of the most used MooTools methods is the setStyle() method, which allows you to set CSS style declarations for an element. One of the limitations of MooTools' setStyle() method is that it sets the specific style for all medias.

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!