PSD

PSD is the native layered raster graphics file format of the Adobe Photoshop program line. The format has gone through multiple versions, each being downwards (but not always upwards) compatible.

PSD is a partially-documented proprietary format. It is very large and complex. Despite this, decoding the primary image of a PSD file is often fairly simple. If an application claims to support PSD, that could mean just about anything.

Images are usually compressed with PackBits, or uncompressed. "Zip" compression, by which it apparently means zlib, is also supported.

See Also

• PSB

See Photoshop for other related formats.

Identification

PSD files begin with bytes '8' 'B' 'P' 'S' 0x00 0x01.

Specifications

• Adobe Photoshop File Formats Specification (current version)
  • Other versions (from archive.org): 2010-07, 2012-06, 2012-12, 2013-06, 2013-10, 2016-06
• Photoshop File Formats Specification V6.0 Release 2
• PHOTOSDK.PDF - Adobe Photoshop 3.0.4 SDK
  • ADOBE.TXT - Photoshop 3.0.4 File Format
• PHOTOSHP.TXT - Adobe Photoshop 2.5 File Format
• PSD.rb: Anatomy of a PSD File

Software

Viewers, editors, and converters

• Adobe Photoshop
• ImageMagick
• Konvertor
• XnView

Libraries and tools

• PSD.rb (Ruby)
• psd-tools (Python)
• Libpsd (C)
• psdump (C++; uses Libpsd)

Sample files

• "Free PSD" websites are abundant. Some examples:
  • PsdKing
  • psdGraphics
  • Freepik → PSD
• tombexcavator samples

Links

See also Photoshop#Links.

• Wikipedia: Adobe Photoshop#File format
• Adobe Photoshop website
• Adobe Photoshop File Format Summary, from the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats
• Open-Source PSD import code from GIMP

Commentary

• Some thoughts about the PSD format
• Rant about PSD format in comments of a program's source code