PsDotNet – A strongly typed, intuitive, .NET library used to automate Adobe Photoshop

About

PsDotNet is a strongly typed, intuitive, .NET library to assist in automating Adobe Photoshop. PsDotNet was created out of a need to use other C# libraries and external data to create art content.

Adobe provides numerous fantastic ways for scriptwriters and programmers to automate Photoshop. One of the methods they provide is a COM interface. This is great, but if you have used it for anything more than some basic automation, you know that it requires a bit of spelunking to understand what parameters a method is looking for or how things relate. Additionally, while the COM exposes a lot of control, there is much more power laying underneath if you know how to coax it out.

PsDotNet attempts to improve up on what options are available for developers needing to automate Photoshop from C#.

Features

Support for CS3, CS4, CS5, CS6, CC, CC2014, CC2015, CC2017, CC2018, CC2019, CC2020, CC2021, CC2022, CC2023, CC2024

Single .dll that wraps and extends the COM interface that Adobe provides into a strongly typed and intuitive library.

Provides a foundation on which developers can create additional functionality by using Photoshop’s Action Manager classes all within C#. See information on PsDotNet Listener for specifics.

Write Once

PsDotNet allows you to use the same code for all basic functionality for all supported versions of Photoshop. The library also handles breaking API changes as well as adding new functionality for newer versions.

Robust Coverage

PsDotNet allows developers to automate a significant amount of Photoshop’s functionality:

Opening, saving, and renaming documents

Document, art layer, layer set, layer masks, and channel creation and duplication

Art Layer and Layer Set reordering

Crop, rotate or flip a image or art layer

Resize the image or canvas

Copy and pasting content from one document to another

Applying filters and styles to art layers

Creating and utilizing paths and subpaths

Getting or setting the foreground and background colors

This list can go on and on, but suffice it to say that you can automate pretty much everything except the actual brush painting the canvas.

Extended Functionality

There is a growing list of additional functionaly, such as enhanced support for Gradients, Paths, and Layer Masks, that the COM interface does not directly provide available in PsDotNet.