TechAirlines: Technology Tips

Don’t have Photoshop and need to open PSD files? Are alternatives like GIMP too slow and heavy? I recommend Paint.NET as a great free alternative to Photoshop because its lightweight and fast. Unfortunately, it does not support PSD files. Luckily, thanks to a free plugin, it can open and save PSD files.

Simpy download the zip file and extract Photoshop.dll. Place this file into the FileTypes directory inside your Paint.NET install directory. Then, just open up Paint.NET and PSD files can be opened and saved.

The Photoshop Plugin adds an option to save and open PSD files

Not all Photoshop file features are supported however in my testing, this worked quite well as a great lightweight alternative to Photoshop. According to the plugin site, the following features are supported:

• Layers
• Masks (only loading see To do list)
• RAW or RLE compressed files
• The following color modes are supported for loading an image
  • Gray scale
  • Indexed
  • 32 Bit-RGBA
  • CMYK (lossy conversation)
  • Multichannel CMY (lossy conversation)
  • Duotone (as gray scale)
  • Lab (lossy conversation)
• For saving an image only 32-Bit RGBA is supported

Download Paint.NET here (Windows only)

Download the Photoshop plugin for Paint.NET here

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