Vincent 4.0
Digital paper and pen for visual thinking
Start new thread

What Vincent’s PSD round-trip preserves—and what it rasterizes

by•

A fair question came up on Vincent’s launch thread: layer styles and blending modes are where PSD interchange usually stops being honest.

Vincent’s current contract is deliberately narrow. It imports 8-bit RGB/RGBA PSD layers as raster layers and retains names, bounds, blend-mode keys, opacity, and visibility in its session/XMP manifest. It does not reconstruct Photoshop layer styles, smart objects, adjustment layers, editable text/vector structure, or masks as editable masks; raster pixels are the compatibility fallback.

On export, Vincent writes a merged preview and separate rasterized layers from bottom to top, including text, shapes, and images after rasterization. Native layer records are currently Normal, 100% opacity, and visible; preserved values stay in Vincent metadata rather than being rewritten as Photoshop-native properties.

The honest positioning is raster-oriented PSD interchange, not lossless Photoshop document editing.

If PSD is part of your sketch-to-production workflow, which feature would matter most next: native blend modes, editable masks, or effect preservation?

8 views

Add a comment

Replies

Best

For my workflow, editable masks would probably be the next step since they tend to be part of everyday editing, even in mostly raster-based projects.

That is a useful priority signal—thank you. Editable masks are not preserved as editable today; they currently fall back to raster pixels. Vincent is still not release-ready, and sales/download access remain unavailable. For your everyday use, would basic editable layer masks be enough, or are nondestructive mask transforms essential too? I’ll only report back here when there is reproducible round-trip evidence.