Don’t have Photoshop, and your colleagues have sent a PSD file? You start wondering how to open PSD files since you don’t have Photoshop installed on your PC. Photoshop is certainly the best image processor in the market, and you get a lot of image editing features with it. However, investing in such expensive software, just for opening the PSD files and making few changes in the images, is certainly not a good idea.
How to open PSD files without using Adobe Photoshop
You don’t have to worry anymore! There are several ‘other’ ways with which you can open PSD files without having Photoshop installed on your system. You will be happy to know that many of these tools are free to use. Thus, they are the best alternative (and free!) for the expensive Photoshop software.
Use GIMP to open PSD files
GIMP stands for ‘GNU Image Manipulation Program’. It is a free tool that can be easily used on Windows. It offers useful features such as image authoring, image composition, and photo retouching. It can be used as a paint program as well as a proficient photo retouching tool. It can also be used as a format converter for the image, mass production image renderer, and batch processing system. It plays all these roles very efficiently. GIMP is extendable, and it can be augmented with a variety of extensions and plug-ins. Its easy-to-use interface makes the user experience better.
Use Go2Convert to open PSD files
Go2Convert is yet another free image converter tool which can be used to convert your PSD file into a viewable format like JPEG. In order to do so, upload your PSD file on this website. You can also download the image from the URL in the adjacent tab.
When you click on ‘Upload Now’, you can see the information about the image you uploaded. The window displays image title, file size, and time elapsed time after uploading the file. You can also select the format from the drop-down list to which you want to convert your PSD file. Not only JPEG, but you can convert the file into numerous known formats like BMP, DIB, GIF, M2V, PBM, PDF, PNG, and many more. You can choose the format as per your requirements. You can also select the quality of the converted image.
When you click on ‘Convert Now’, the PSD file gets converted into the selected format. Here in the following example, the PSD file is converted into a JPG image. You can now download and open PSD files using the Go2Convert tool.
Apart from these tools, there are other free-to-use image converter tools available in the market such as IrfanView and Paint.NET. However, GIMP and Go2Convert are easier to use and don’t require any sort of expertise to convert the image in a viewable format.
So stop worrying about how to open PSD files without Photoshop. Try these tools and let us know which you find to be the most useful and user-friendly!
Thanks for speaking well of GIMP! I use that in connection with a number of other paid/free image editors; a number of online places (e.g., GIMP Plugin Registry)…if you’re willing to wade through them…contain enough Photoshop-like brushes, plugins, fonts and textures you can at least about equal Photoshop capability; a few really advanced GIMP users also make great tuts available on YouTube for newbs. I use the Poratbleapps version, my own has grown with manual additions to around half-gigabyte in size, and indeed it does handle PSD in very acceptable fashion. Another GIMP plus if you know Python or Scheme, you can literally write your own plugin to do whatever you want it to…no EULA required.
Great information Dan, Thanks for the input!
I’m trying to open a PSD file (Avery Templates) and do not have photoshop…will this software work for these labels or is this primarily for Photo work….?? I hope this is seen!
Hi Lindsey,
You can open the Avery Templates in PSD format using GIMP or even Go2Convert. For this, you can either download GIMP or open Go2Convert online. However, Go2Convert will only be able to show you what the file looks like. You won’t be able to make any changes into the file. I hope this helps you.
Hey Ankit,
Thanks for the post. I wanted to convert my PSD file to JPEG and I tried using the Go2Convert option.
However, it gave me an error of Improper Image Header.
Do you know exactly, why this error might have popped up?
Thanks! :)