This programmer has written about the PSD format in colorful detail: "Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday."<p><a href="https://code.google.com/p/xee/source/browse/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#108" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/xee/source/browse/XeePhotoshopLoad...</a><p>(ref: first link in the article)
>Adobe has never produced an easy way for developers to work with the format.<p>That's not entirely fair. Adobe has openly released a comprehensive description of the format which is, as far as I know, accurate. The problem is that the format itself is a heap of features piled on year after year with apparently no regard for doing things consistently.
Does anyone else think it's weird that they decided to make this library in Ruby? It drastically cuts down on the audience. Why not C/C++ with wrappers for all the dynamic languages?<p>EDIT: nevermind, it makes sense now that I see their main product is a version control system for designers. Still, it would be nice to see this ported to native code some day.
Is this more feature complete (esp. regarding to newer PS versions) than e.g. libpsd?<p><a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libpsd/" rel="nofollow">http://sourceforge.net/projects/libpsd/</a>
Thank you very much for doing this! I wish all people hacking the PSD format would join forces and help with one project. There are too many partial implementations which scratch an itch instead of trying to be a full implementation.
Does anyone know of a similar tool for Python?<p>Not trying to start a Ruby/Python fight or anything; Python just happens to be my preferred language.
Great work and thanks for building this. There's a lot of room for improvement in automating manipulative photoshop exports, and I look forward to seeing what people do with this, especially in terms of building command line tools.
I have been trying to do this from last 3 months. But I intend to make modifications to layers (turn on or off, change colors) and export to PNG. When I saw Psd.rb I thought it is done. But it just exports the channel data saved by Photoshop. So our modifications wont reflect in it.
I reckon a good tool (that this psd.rd wouldn't actually help write, but), would be one that rendered an html/css page - and exported a layered PSD, so you could prototype an app, render it to .psd and send it to your designer friend to make it look rad.
This is a great example of why open source is brilliant. Everybody wins. We get a PSD parser. LayerVault benefits from the world improving they're core product too.
So, will there be writing .PSD files as well? This would be the über thing. Imagine: upload a .PSD and get back a clean HTML layout + bootstrap_overrides.css
These are great news for developers and an easy way to communicate between designers with developers. Is the beginning of a solution for a big problem.