Most professional artists don’t pay for their software (their employers do), and PSD files are the main interchange format for high-end graphics.<\/p>\n
But PSD isn’t always possible to open or edit. Adobe’s crappy copy-protection refuses to run on some of my computers, and CS is far too damn expensive for mere mortals, so I can’t always use Photoshop to edit files. <\/p>\n
OS X makes this a little easier – it has an excellent built-in image-and-PDF viewer (Preview) which effortlessly (and VERY fast) opens PSD files. It will even export those images to flat PNG, with a 100% success rate. But that’s no use when you’re doing complex graphics (e.g. designing GUIs for mobile-apps) and need to do layer-by-layer manipulation.<\/p>\n
I’ve tried many editors, both free and commercial, and I’ve found Inkscape (free) and Adobe’s Illustrator\/Photoshop (expensive) to be the only ones worth mentioning. Inkscape works great on all major OS’s, too.<\/p>\n
BUT … Inkscape still doesn’t support PSD files. This is pretty bizarre – except that Inkscape development has stalled \/ slowed to a crawl over the last 12 months, and I think they’re suffering the open-source problem of a temporary (long) drout in volunteers.<\/p>\n
(interestingly, Firefox is about to release a new version of the browser that displays SVG files natively. SVG is the file format that Inkscape was “invented” for editing – so I suspect Inkscape will see a surge in interest during 2011)<\/p>\n
NB: please don’t mention the GIMP. Even the latest version can’t handle simple PSD files – despite that being a “feature” of the app for almost a decade now, it still *doesn’t work*.<\/p>\n
There are “conversion” programs out there, but they mostly all just use the same open-source backend (ImageMagick), which has long had problems with anything non-bitmap.<\/p>\n