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Introduction to Advanced PSD Add-on

Advanced PSD Add-on for Graphics Mill is an additional module for Graphics Mill for .NET, which provides PSD processing functionality. This add-on gives you an outstanding help when you want to load PSD file layer by layer and extract both raster and text data.

For example, you can use Advanced PSD Add-on if you need to keep templates in PSD to create personalized graphics, e.g. when building online business card editor or similar application.

Features of Advanced PSD Add-on

Advanced PSD Add-on includes the following features:

Read raster layers:
- Get the bitmap from the layer;
- Get the name of the layer;
- Get dimensions of the layer;
- Identify pixel format;
- Identify visibility of the layer;
- Define the position of top left corner of the bitmap.
Read text layers:
- Get raster representation of the text layer (the same features as for raster layers);
- Get text string;
- Get text font;
- Get text color;
- Get text region size;
- Get paragraph settings.
Get number of layers;
Get pre-rendered preview of the PSD file (with all layers merged);
Support PSD files created in all Adobe® Photoshop® versions since 7 (including Photoshop CS2).

Note

Advanced PSD Add-on is not intended to get 100% of information stored in PSD files. If some feature of PSD file is not listed above (e.g. vector masks, rich text formatting, blending options), it means that it is not extracted. When you prepare PSD templates to process with this add-on, you should keep all these limitations in mind. You cannot process arbitrary PSD file with this add-on.

All detailed information how to use Advanced PSD Add-on will be described in the subsequent articles.

How To Use This Guide

This guide is intended to aid to anyone willing to start working with Advanced PSD Add-on. The guide consists of four parts:

Advanced PSD Add-on Concepts - describes the whole idea of Advanced PSD Add-on;
Loading Raster Layers - shows how to read raster layer from PSD files. Code snippet included;
Loading Text Layers - shows how to read text layers from PSD files. Code snippet included;
Merging Layers - shows how to combine layers into one image. Code snippet included.