Thursday, December 20, 2018

adobe photoshop - Lightweight psd viewer with layer support


I'm looking for a lightweight psd viewer that allows me to turn on/off layers.


I currently work at a web-design firm and at some points in the project lifetime we need to compare the resulting website with the layout designed by our graphics team. These layouts are in a single PSD with each part/component of the layout in a separate layer. Due to this the file-size catapults to +100Mb sizes sometimes which is no problem for the graphics team with their workstations ... but for us developers ...


What i'm looking for is a way to open this psd and toggle some layers without actually firing up photoshop and loading the file. I have netbeans, firefox, chrome and several other apps running simultaneously and when firing up photoshop and loading the 100Mb file the system almost grinds to a halt.


Edit: I'm using OSX



Answer



Given you already have Photoshop, it sounds like you need a machine of similar spec to your graphics team.


I'm not sure that anything which allows you to open a complex, layered Photoshop file and fully supports its layer effects compositing would be significantly more lightweight - it's not simply turning a stack of raster images with alpha transparency on and off.


Another option could be for your graphics team to output a simplified version of the artwork at key stages, with multiple layers merged as far as possible.


(If the artwork was for print, the simplified artwork could be reduced resolution, but that's probably not appropriate for website layouts.)



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