How ClipToPsd converts your files

ClipToPsd reads a Clip Studio Paint .clip file and writes a Photoshop file with your layers intact — the tree, the names, the masks, the blend modes, the text. It is not a screenshot and not a flattened export: what you open in Photoshop is the document you were working on.

Some things in Clip Studio have no equivalent in Photoshop. Where that happens we do not guess silently — the conversion report tells you exactly which layers were affected and how. This page is the full list, so you know before you convert.

What comes across intact

• The layer tree. Folders, nesting, order, names (in any language), visibility, opacity, lock state and layer label colours.
• Layer masks. On layers and on folders. Clipping (“clip to layer below”) is preserved as a Photoshop clipping group.
• Blend modes. 30 of Clip Studio’s blend modes map to a Photoshop mode. Any mode outside that set falls back to Normal and says so in the report — it is never changed behind your back.
• Canvas size, resolution and DPI, at full resolution. No downscaling.
• Text as editable text. Text boxes come across as real Photoshop type layers — you can retype them, change the font, restyle them. Alignment, colour, leading, tracking, underline, strikethrough and vertical writing come with it. Speech-balloon text comes across editable too — Clip Studio’s own export rasterises it; here it stays real type, re-wrapped by Photoshop in its true text box.
• Adjustment layers — all nine Clip Studio correction types. Curves, Hue/Saturation, Gradient Map, Brightness/Contrast, Levels, Colour Balance, Posterise, Invert Gradation and Threshold come across as real, still-editable Photoshop adjustment layers — the dial comes with them. Gradient maps that use Clip Studio’s newer perceptual mixing are written with classic interpolation and identical colour stops, so the file opens cleanly in every Photoshop version — the report notes each one.
• Fill layers. Solid colour and linear or radial gradient fills come across as real, still-editable Photoshop fill layers — you can restyle the gradient or change the colour. Clip Studio’s own export flattens them into pixels.

What comes across as pixels

Not a failure — a deliberate choice to keep the image exactly right when the structure cannot be.

• Vector layers and speech-balloon shapes. These are rasterised. The drawing is there and looks right; the editable path is not. If a balloon was drawn with a Clip Studio brush that Photoshop has no equivalent for, an exact vector would look wrong — so we keep the pixels instead.
• Comic panel frames. Preserved as a layer with its mask, not as an editable frame object.
• Layer effects. The Border/Edge effect becomes a real Photoshop stroke. Other Clip Studio layer effects — tone/screen, paper texture, watercolour edge, line extraction — are preserved baked into the layer.
• Material and pattern brush strokes, which are drawn by approximation: the stroke is there, the texture can differ slightly.
• Elliptical gradient fills. Photoshop’s fill layers have no elliptical gradient, so this one is drawn into pixels — exactly as Clip Studio’s own export does. Solid, linear and radial fills stay editable.
• Furigana (ruby annotations). The small kana above kanji come across in the pixels, drawn as Clip Studio drew them. They are not in the editable type layer — that carries the base text only — and in the rare cases where the original rendering cannot be reused, the box is redrawn without them.

What is not supported

• Colour modes other than RGB. Output is always RGB. Greyscale and monochrome source documents may not convert correctly.
• Anything above 8 bits per channel. The conversion stops with a clear error rather than silently degrading your file.
• Canvases above 300,000 px on either side — larger than the Photoshop file format itself allows.
• Rare, unmapped adjustment types. These cannot become editable adjustments yet; the layer arrives without its effect, and the report names it.

PSB or PSD?

PSB is the default, and for webtoon pages it is the right one. The classic PSD format cannot hold a canvas taller than 30,000 px, and a single webtoon episode passes that easily. PSB is Photoshop’s large-document format — same program, same layers, no height ceiling.

Pick PSD only when something downstream demands it. If your canvas is taller than 30,000 px, PSD is refused rather than silently truncated.

The conversion report

Every conversion produces a report. It is not decoration: it lists every layer where the result differs from your original, and how.

Facts that are faithful — an empty layer that came out empty, a mode that mapped exactly — are not shown. Silence in the report means nothing was lost.

Findings are split in two: notes (a difference we do not expect you to see, but worth knowing) and warnings (a difference we measured, and you should look at the layer). We would rather show you one line that matters than twenty that do not.

Limits

How it is verified

Every change to the converter runs against a corpus of real webtoon episodes — full Japanese and Korean pages, hundreds of layers each — and the output is compared layer by layer, mask byte by mask byte, against what Clip Studio itself exports. A change that moves a single pixel it should not move fails the build.

Text is checked by opening the result in Photoshop, not by trusting the file format.

This is still being improved

The converter is not finished, and this page is the honest state of it today. Some things listed above as approximate are approximate because we have not solved them yet — not because they cannot be solved.

Every change is checked against real Clip Studio exports before it ships, and the list on this page moves in one direction. If a conversion of yours came out wrong in a way this page does not explain, that is worth telling us about at support@cliptopsd.com — an unexplained difference is a defect, and defects get fixed.

Terms of Use