Exporting to psd

[Rhuantavan]

I must say that while I love to work in Affinity Designer and tried to use it at work, where the majority of other machines are Windows PCs, it just fails short at the export quality to psd. I expected photoshop exports to be at par with imported ones, but the layer groups and effects simply get flattened into pixel layers. This makes my product unusable to the other Photoshop-using colleagues.

 

Is it just a problem with certain photoshop versions, or the import is simply not there yet? Any plans for improvements? Thanks!

[MattP]

Hi Rhuantavan,

 

PSD import and export are constantly evolving. If you check out the latest beta version of Affinity Designer you should find some changes that may help, but I think there are larger changes in my current development branch - I intend to produce a new beta build from this in the very near future, so stay tuned :)

 

Thanks,

Matt

[Rhuantavan]

Sounds good, looking forward to future versions!

[Ben]

Working on PSD export right now.  Masking is one of the areas that should improve, and part of this will make it into the next Beta.  Unfortunately, PSD cannot fully represent a deeply nested Affinity document, so in those cases parts of the document will have to be flattened - but, we will preserve vectors and raster masks and clipping sets wherever possible.

 

Again, if there are certain combinations of layers/masks that don't appear to work, you can always let us know here and I can examine the individual cases further.  We are pretty much writing the PSD importer and exporter based on test documents.  Until I see an outside case, it may be overlooked.

[jradicus]

I know this post is over a month old, but I'm having the same trouble with the PSD export. All of my folders are flattened into separate pixel layers, however it was from a fairly complex imported PSD that I was exporting.

 

So I've been using the trial (and have now purchased the software) and raving about your software to all my coworkers and friends and while it's awesome, the consensus has been that "we have no use for it if it doesn't integrate with Adobe's software both ways." I think the use case for a refined .psd or .ai export feature is that you've broken in an Adobe dominated market. If a freelancer/contract designer does, for example, a web design for a company, chances are that company will require them to provide a PSD.

 

All that being said, I think your software is far superior to both Photoshop and Illustrator (from what I've seen so far) and you already have my money :). I just wanted to chime in on this because I would be very interested to see how the export feature develops over time. I know that it is no small task to implement this, especially since Adobe most likely won't like the competition... but I think it's very important nonetheless.

 

Keep up the good work!

[Ben]

PSD export improvements are coming in the next Beta. Just added full export of raster and vector masks, strokes, etc. It is something I will be working on constantly since a lot of improvements will be based on specific examples people give us.

 

So, if you have any files that don't export correctly, you can send me examples and I'll see what we can do.  That said, since Affinity is way more versatile, there will be some things that just cannot be reproduced in a PSD file without being flattened to raster.

[jradicus]

I'm happy that it will be included in the next beta. Your comment - "it may be overlooked" - really scared me, haha. The PSD export is not working for any file that I work on. I even just created a vector rectangle and exported. When I opened it in Photoshop, it was a rasterized layer.

 

I can definitely see how AD's versatility would make certain features impossible to reproduce in PSD format. Perhaps a nice feature would be for AD to detect all the things in your file that can not be reproduced in whatever file type you are exporting to and displaying an error list warning you of diminished quality across software.

[Ben]

Have a go with the latest Beta and see how the latest PSD export performs.

 

We may add some sort of reporting at a later stage.  The latest exporter does include options for various aspects of a PSD, allowing you to preserve edibility or roll back to rasterised output where Photoshop cannot reproduce our document model.

[jradicus]

Oh, nice! I was just using the version in the app store.

 

So shapes export properly, however text gets flattened and rasterized still. Good work though, it's nice to see continual improvement to great software. I'm loving it so far.

[Ben]

Text is going to be a big area to solve.  I'll be working with another of our guys to crack that one.  We may have multiple options for text, including rasterising, converting to curves/paths for export, and exporting in fully editable form (though this will be the difficult bit).

[jradicus]

That's a bummer that editable text is so difficult, but I get it. I like the idea of multiple options though!