GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 142468
errors loading Adobe PSD files
Last modified: 2005-12-20 17:24:18 UTC
I am having problems loading these sample images from Adobe Photoshop 7.0 in the gimp. (errors/cannot open) i did some tests against gimp 1.2 and gimp 1.3 and checked only one or two of the files against a (Knoppix) gimp 2.0.1. from the gimp 2.0.1 error messages some of the problems seem to be related to XMP. apologies in advance but i dont have time to provide more detailed information at the moment.
Created attachment 27673 [details] problematic Adobe Photoshop 7.0 sample file
I have other files, but they seem to be too big i had to zip the above file to make it small enough
some of the other PSD files (and some tiffs that popped an error message in gimp but not cinepaint) http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/temp-folder/Adobe%20Photoshop%207.0%20-% 20Samples/
Well, nobody ever claimed we would be able to open all PSD files, so I am marking this as an enhancement request.
The problem with PS > 5 is that the developers SDK (which documents the .psd format) has been closed since then. We will (usually) be able to open .psds from PhotoShop <=5, or even files from later versions that don't use newer features. However, supporting later file formats would require reverse engineering the format, which obviously takes quite a bit of time. Adding Adam as a CC in case he has some insights. As a matter of interest, how does ImageMagick fare? Cheers, Dave.
That seems like a fair summary AFAIK. Reverse engineering takes time (which no-one seems have much of lately :)) but the other main hurdle is that a potential developer really needs a copy of (or excellent access to) an appropriately troublesome PS version to generate test-files with, and a platform to run it on, otherwise things are quite a lot more difficult. I guess there are plenty of people out there with PS though.
The latest spec I have is for Photoshop 6.0 (September 2000). I can attach it here if needed.
It would be nice to have the file formats specification available if it can be done without violating copyright, but I think it is probably too big to attach here.
Getting the spec for PSD entails "signing" an agreement saying (among other things) that you won't share it. Perhaps the PSD 6 spec is not covered by this, but I believe it is. I am pretty sure that either PSD 4 or PSD 5 were the last specs available free of charge and without constraints. Dave.
I think I found the PSD 6 spec on a regular site (maybe even the Adobe page itself, can't rememeber). Anyhow, I will look into it tomorrow to see if it has any constraints. If not, I will attach it here. It's not that big.
Created attachment 27801 [details] Photoshop 6.0 file format spec There are no restrictions in this file, so I assume it's freely redistributable. Hopefully there's not that much difference in the fileformat from 6 to 7. IMO it's very important to have as much Photoshop compatibility as we can since it will make it more easy for users to switch from Photoshop to GIMP.
Maurits, What format is the file in? When I try to download it I get just application/octet-stream, which isn't very useful. A more useful mime type would be great. Cheers, Dave.
It's a PDF file.
Comment on attachment 27801 [details] Photoshop 6.0 file format spec Changed mime type of attachment.
It might be a good idea to first try to get this plug-in compatible with the Photoshop 6 spec. Does anyone know what's still missing? Does the plug-in work at all with version 6 files? Would be nice if we have a collection of problematic files. If there are more issues, we should make this bug report into a tracking one, and file separate reports.
I'm pretty sure the files I linked to exhibit differnt problems i'd make seperate reports but i dont have sample files small enough that they can actually be attached but there are some other simpler issues: Photoshop documents cannot be saved with the .PDD extension (last time I checked) i dont think line guides are being preserved at all i had a test file with some (named but otherwise) empty "coloured layers" which disappeared (without any sort of warning) on import too but i think "coloured layers" are probably a newer feature than version 6. (other files that had coloured layers with actual content in them imported correctly but obviously the coloured coding/labelling dissappeared because it is not a featue the gimp supports). (slightly random idea: If someone hooked the gimp up to gnome-print to provide PDF export there might be a way to exploit some the new PDF import features in Adobe and generally PDF export would be interesting). There are 30 day trial version of Adobe Photoshop CS and Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 "freely" available although the download is pretty big, but I believe that newer versions dont yet work properly with Wine. If there is a need for more sample files I expect a polite request to the user mailing list would probably result in many (windows) users willing to submit sample files.
Setting a few target milestones now that 2.2 is coming closer.
PSD files produced in ImageReady seem to fail to open much more often here are three versions of a file none of which open in Gimp 2 (it is a screenshot, the png is there in case you want to know what it should look like.) I'll attach the smallest version. http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/temp-folder/Adobe%20ImageReady%207.0%20Samples/
Created attachment 30562 [details] problematic adobe image ready PSD file
2004-11-09 Jay Cox <jaycox@gimp.org> * plug-ins/common/psd.c: Skip resources with unknown signatures instead of quiting. Fixes bug #142468, and bug #152728
*** Bug 161486 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***