Convert PSD to JPG
JPG is the right answer when the file is going somewhere that wants a small, ordinary photograph — an email, a marketplace listing, a form that rejects everything else. It is the wrong answer if the artwork has transparent areas, because JPG cannot hold them, and this page tells you what happens to them instead of quietly deciding.
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Up to 50 MB. Deleted automatically after 30 minutes.
What it does
- The flattened composite, never a single layer
- Transparency composited onto white, on purpose
- Encoded at quality 82, a number we publish
- CMYK print documents converted to sRGB
How to use PSD to JPG
- 1
Add the PSD
Drop the file in. The flattened composite is read — the image Photoshop shows on open, not one of the layers behind it.
- 2
Transparency becomes white
JPG has no alpha channel, so something must go behind a see-through pixel. White is chosen, because it is what almost every destination expects.
- 3
Download the JPG
Encoded at quality 82. Big enough to look right, small enough to send.
How it works
The document's flattened composite — frame zero, the image Photoshop shows when the file opens — is read by ImageMagick. Transparent pixels are composited onto white, alpha is removed, and the result is encoded as JPEG at quality 82.
Two decisions that most converters make silently
Converting a PSD to a JPG forces two choices, and a tool that does not tell you which it made is not saving you a decision, only hiding one.
Which image. A PSD holds a stack of full-canvas layers plus a flattened composite. Picking the wrong one gives a plausible-looking file that is a fragment of the artwork. The composite is read here, always, with no picker — because a picker is a way to get it wrong.
What goes behind transparency. JPEG has no alpha channel. Something has to fill a see-through pixel, and the honest options are white, black, or asking. White is used, because it is what a document destined for a page, a listing or an email almost always wants. Tools that produce black logos are not choosing black; they are not choosing at all, and black is what the underlying pixel data happens to be.
When JPG is the wrong target
Use PNG instead when any of these is true:
- the artwork has transparent areas you want to keep
- it is a logo, an icon, or flat-color graphics with hard edges
- it will be edited again, or re-saved more than once
JPEG is built for photographs: continuous tone, gradual changes, no hard edges. It handles them beautifully and handles line art badly, producing faint haloes around sharp boundaries. And every re-save loses a little more, so a JPG that gets edited and saved repeatedly degrades in a way a PNG never does.
Use JPG when the picture is photographic, the file needs to be small, and the destination is a screen.
The original is not replaceable
A JPG of a PSD is a picture of the finished work. The layers, masks, editable text and smart objects are not compressed or hidden — they are simply not representable in the format.
Convert for sending. Keep the PSD for working.
Examples
A mockup for an email
A 40 MB layered document becomes a file small enough to attach, at a quality nobody will question on a screen.
A logo with a transparent background
The transparent area becomes white. If that is wrong for you, /psd-to-png keeps it transparent — this is the case where the format choice matters.
Frequently asked questions
What quality is the JPG saved at?
82 on the usual 0-100 scale. That is high enough that the difference from the original is invisible at normal viewing size, and low enough that the file is a fraction of a PNG of the same picture. It is stated because "we compress your image" without a number is not a claim anyone can check, and because a converter quietly using 60 is why some tools produce visible blocking.
My logo came back with a white background. Why?
Because JPG cannot store transparency — there is no place in the format to record that a pixel is see-through. Every JPG converter must therefore put something behind a transparent area. White is chosen here and said out loud; some tools use black, which is what you get when nobody decided at all. If you need the transparency, /psd-to-png keeps it.
Why not just take the top layer?
Because it is almost never the picture. Every layer in a PSD is the full size of the document, so the top one might be a texture, a shadow, or an adjustment layer that means nothing on its own. The format stores a flattened composite for exactly this reason and that is what is read.
Can I convert several at once?
One file per conversion here. For a folder of them, the desktop route is faster than any website — ImageMagick, which is what runs on our server, is free and does the same job locally in a loop.
Does the file leave my computer?
Yes. Reading PSD properly needs software that runs on a server rather than in a browser tab, so the file has to travel. Your upload and the result are deleted within 30 minutes by a timer, and nothing is stored, indexed, examined or attached to any account — there is no account to attach it to.