What’s a good way to extract the layers from a PhotoShop file, without using PhotoShop

adobe-photoshop

I would install PhotoShop. I really would. But Adobe seems to insist on me also having Adobe Bridge, and Adobe Updater, and something else — about a gigabyte of software I don’t want gumming up my system.

But I still want to be able to extract the layers from a PhotoShop file as images, with transparency preserved. I’m a fussy one.

Any tools that do this, aside from PhotoShop itself?

Best Answer

You can use Paint.Net with the PSD plugin (+ support thread) to open the PSD file, and then copy and paste individual layers to new documents.

Newer plugin releases may not work with old Paint.net versions. But you can try out older plugin versions.
For example the PSD Plugin v1.04 works well with Paint.NET v3.3.6

The same objective can also be fulfilled with The Gimp, but it is a much bigger install than Paint.Net.

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