How to export text from Clip Studio Paint into a PSD file for Photoshop or an Affinity application

How Do I Export Text/Fonts to Photoshop or Affinity Designer in Vector Format?

It’s been a longstanding issue with Clip Studio Paint that when you export your project to a Photoshop format file, it will rasterize your text. The text becomes a bunch of pixels rather than a collection of letters from a specific font.

You can’t, in other words, edit the text easily in another program, even if you saved it into PSD format, which is made for Photoshop. Photoshop won’t even be able to recognize the font you used in the file. It’s pure pixels at that point.

In the just-released Clip Studio Paint 1.12.0 update, they’ve fixed that issue. You can make a duplicate of the file you’re working on, save it as a PSD file, and check a box to keep the text layers as text and not pixels.

Let me show you how it works now, because there is a trick and an extra step involved.

How to Keep the Letters in Vector Form

I put together a super simple file for this example. It’s one line of text in Comicraft’s Dave Gibbons’ font, with an oval drawn around it. They’re both vector items on separate layers.

To export this out and keep everything editable as vector bits later, you need to go to File -> Save Duplicate -> .psd(Photoshop Document).

GIve the file a name and a folder in the next window that pops up and agree to this window in case you haven’t told it to never to show itself again:

Seriously, check that box so you never need to read that warning again.

The next window is where it gets interesting:

Be sure to check off the “Text” button in the “Output image” section. Then, go to the dropdown for “Text layer”. Choose “Text only.” This will preserve the text in its original vector format — essentially, it’ll save the meta data instead of the pixels. Your text will be editable in Photoshop or whatever Photoshop-compatible image editor you use next.

If you select “Image & text” it will save out your text layers twice — once as vector and once as pixels/raster. It’s redundant, unnecessary, and only clutters up your layers.

How it Looks on the Other Side

I don’t have Photoshop, but I do have Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. They can import PSD files, so I tried it with this one.

This is how things look in Affinity Designer after I load the file in:

You can see how the layer with the text on it has the “T” icon next to it to indicate that it’s a text layer. Look in the upper right corner and you’ll see where it recognizes the font as “CCDaveGibbons”. I can edit this layer now with whatever text updates I want to do.

Yes, I can also adjust the oval in the other layer by grabbing onto it and resizing it all I want.

For comparison’s sake, here’s how a PSD file I saved before updating to the new version of CSP looked:

You can see that the text layer (highlighted) says it’s a Pixel layer now and doesn’t have the “T” text icon next to it. It’s just another layer with pixels drawn on it. I have the Text tool on and it’s offering me the chance to type something in Arial next. It’s not recognizing the font that is theoretically selected — because it’s not a font that’s selected, but a collection of pixels.

Just to make the difference even more obvious, here’s the side-by-side in Designer of the layers before and after this update:

Clip Studio Paint used to export text as pixels only
Before
Now, Clip Studio Paint can export text as a raster layer so you can edit it in Photoshop, Affinity Designer, etc.
After

The other thing you may notice here is that the layer name and layer type are both the text that’s on the layer. Before, the parenthetical would indicate that it’s a pixel layer. Now, the parenthetical is a repeat of the layer name which is the text in the layer. That doesn’t make much sense, but beggars can’t be choosers.

If there’s a lot of text on the layer, it cuts it off after the first batch of characters and there’s no room left for the parenthetical.

Reminders and Little Details

  • You need Clip Studio Paint 1.12 to use this new option.
  • You aren’t exporting a file here. You are using the “Save Duplicate” option. Exports are more for final publishing, anyway. What you’re really doing is creating a duplicate of your project, just in a different format.
  • CSP will only export the font, size, and color of the text. If you’ve done fancy CSP effects and tricks to your fonts, they’ll be lost in translation.
  • This will not work in reverse. You can’t import a PSD file into Clip Studio Paint and retain the vector format for the text layers.

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