Most of the questions we get about .psd come down to one of two things: the file was renamed, or it was written by something other than Adobe Inc. PSD keeps layers, text, adjustment layers and smart objects; the composite is written only when the file was saved with maximised compatibility.
Inside the header
A 32-byte header: the ASCII signature 8BPS, a 2-byte version, 6 reserved bytes, then channel count, height, width, bit depth and colour mode.
How we identify it
The check is cheap: the first 4 bytes are 38 42 50 53. If anything else is sitting at offset 0, the file was renamed and the extension is the problem, not the file.
What reads this format
Installed options: Adobe Photoshop (all versions), Affinity Photo, GIMP 2.10+ (PSD import), CorelDRAW (import), Photopea (browser). None of them have to be the program that made the file: Universal Viewer reads it and writes nothing back.
Exporting to other formats
The targets people actually ask for are .jpg, .png, .pdf, .tif, .eps. Each one has its own page with the settings that matter: psd → jpg, psd → png, psd → pdf, psd → tif, psd → eps
Questions we get about this one
How do I know a .psd file is real?
Identify it before you open it — 38 42 50 53 at offset 0. That single look answers most of the questions we get about .psd.
What opens .psd if I do not have Adobe?
Adobe Photoshop (all versions), Affinity Photo, GIMP 2.10+ (PSD import). If nothing installed reads it, the viewer above does.
Notes from the file library
Files of this kind are catalogued with the family named in the table above. The family groups them by what a file carries, not by the application that wrote it, which is why two extensions from the same application can sit in different families.
Two things decide whether a file can be opened on a machine that never had the application that made it: the header, which says what the container is, and the structure behind it, which says whether the contents can be read at all. The conversion guides listed on the page cover the targets that come up most often.
Format pages are rebuilt with each release of the toolset, and the review line at the bottom of the page is when an editor last checked the entry against a file. If a page disagrees with a file you have, send the first sixteen bytes and the build number to the support address and the entry is corrected in the next build.
Reviewed 2026-10-05 by M. Halvorsen.