Convert PSD to PDF

Then the conversion produces a picture of the text rather than the text itself, and searching it finds nothing. Run /pdf-ocr/ to add a recognised text layer first; optical character recognition turns the scanned pixels into selectable, searchable characters that the conversion can then carry through properly.

Yes, and the PSD would not have. Browsers ship a decoder for PDF and none for PSD, so a PSD link forces a download while a PDF renders inline. That is usually the deciding factor when the file is going onto a web page rather than into an application. A PDF looks byte-for-byte identical on every machine and every printer, which is why contracts, invoices and academic papers all live in it.

They are flattened into one picture on the way in, in the order and at the opacities the file specifies, and there is no way back — a PDF has no concept of a layer stack, so what it receives is the composite. Hidden layers are dropped rather than merged, which is worth checking first if the file has old versions of an element switched off inside it. Keep the layered original alongside the document; it is the only copy that stays editable. PSD keeps every editing decision reversible, which is why it is the master format for design work that will be revised.

Slightly, if the image is in CMYK. A PSD can carry print colour, and a document renders on a screen, so the conversion maps those inks into RGB — and the ink gamut contains deep cyans and rich blacks that a screen cannot reproduce, which come back a little duller. Images already in RGB pass through untouched. If the document is heading for a printer rather than a screen, convert late and keep the CMYK original for the press. PSD is huge, opens properly in almost nothing outside Adobe, and has to be flattened before anyone can view or print it.

Export it first if the document is going anywhere but your own machine. A PSD is a working file from a design tool, and the things that make it useful there — editable text, effects, references to assets that live elsewhere — are flattened or ignored the moment it is placed in a page. Exporting deliberately means choosing how it is flattened instead of discovering it later, and it usually produces a much smaller document as well. PSD is Adobe Photoshop’s native document, and it is a working file rather than a delivery format.

It depends entirely on whether real text is present. A PDF generated from a document carries an actual text layer and is searchable; a PDF built from scans or images is a picture of text and is not, until OCR adds a layer. /pdf-ocr/ does that, and it is worth running before any conversion that expects to read the words.

Headings, lists, tables and images are kept, and the fonts used are embedded in the PDF, so it looks the same in every viewer. A font that is not installed on our conversion servers (Calibri, for example) is replaced with a similar one, so line breaks can shift. An image file becomes a PDF page that shows the image.

Not on this page: each PSD you upload becomes a separate PDF. To combine them, convert them here first, then join the PDF files into one document with /pdf-merge/.

A document keeps the page size and orientation saved in it, so a Word file set up as US Letter landscape stays that way. A plain text file has no page setup and comes out as A4 portrait. The converter has no page size or orientation setting, so change the page setup in the original file before converting if you need something different.

Yes when the PSD contains real text (DOCX, ODT, HTML, TXT). Image-based PSD produces an image-only PDF — to make it searchable, use /pdf-ocr/ after conversion to run optical character recognition.