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
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    NSFW Blocker Using MooTools and CSS

    One of my guilty pleasures is scoping out the latest celebrity gossip from PerezHilton.com, DListed.com, and JoBlo.com. Unfortunately, these sites occasionally post NSFW pictures which makes checking these sites on lunch a huge gamble -- a trip to HR's office could be just a click away. Since...

  • By
    Adding Events to Adding Events in MooTools

    Note: This post has been updated. One of my huge web peeves is when an element has click events attached to it but the element doesn't sport the "pointer" cursor. I mean how the hell is the user supposed to know they can/should click on...

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!