PSD is a layered Photoshop document, read here as a single flattened image. PNG is lossless compression with a full 8-bit alpha channel. ImageMagick sits between the two, and this page says exactly what happens to a PSD file on the way to becoming a PNG one.
What runs when a PSD file becomes PNG
ImageMagick 6.9.12, on a machine we rent and watch. Your PSD file is uploaded once, ImageMagick runs once, the PNG comes back, and neither file is kept. PSD to PNG is one of the 3649 pairs that engine was probed on with a real file, which is why it has a page here and why the pairs the probe could not prove do not.
What survives from the PSD into the PNG
The pixel dimensions of your PSD file. The PNG comes out the size the PSD went in, because nothing on this path resizes anything.
Transparency. PSD and PNG both carry a real alpha channel, so a cut-out sent as PSD is still a cut-out as PNG.
Every pixel value. PSD and PNG are both lossless, so the PNG file adds no compression artefacts that the PSD did not already have.
What PSD to PNG costs you
Layers. The PSD document is flattened on the way in, so layer names, masks, adjustment layers and blend modes do not exist on the PNG side.
If a model is going to read the PNG
A PNG file is pixels, and pixels are expensive for a model to read. Handed this PNG, an assistant spends its budget looking at the picture rather than reading it, and it will paraphrase what it thinks it saw. If your PSD is mostly words, the useful move is to pull the text out of it, not to change which picture format holds it.
PSD to PNG, measured rather than promised
Running PSD to PNG against the real engine with a real file, ImageMagick wrote 689 bytes of PNG in under a tenth of a second, machine otherwise idle. That is one PSD file on one day and not an average, which is why the number is given together with the file that produced it.
The PSD to PNG verdict was reached by a format signature, meaning at least four bytes unique to the format were found at the right offset. Which check was used matters, because they do not all prove the same thing, and a status code of 200 proves nothing whatsoever about whether the PNG file has anything inside it.
The same PSD file, sent somewhere else
Other outputs the probe measured out of a PSD file, so the cost of choosing PNG can be read against something. Sizes do not compare across engines, because each family was probed with its own PSD witness file.
PSD to PDF: 237,017 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
PSD to JPG: 1,568 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
PSD to WEBP: 412 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
PSD to GIF: 6,645 bytes in 0.1 seconds, verified by a format signature.
PSD to TIFF: 288,556 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
Other ways into PNG, and what they measured
Among the published routes into PNG, PSD is the number 13 largest output of the 13 measured. The witness files differ, so this ranks the probe run and not your document.
ICO to PNG: 810 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
HEIF to PNG: 1,403 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
EPS to PNG: 1,303 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
HEIC to PNG: 1,403 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
JPG to PNG: 805 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
What we will not pretend about PSD to PNG
A PSD file over 25 MB is refused before the upload finishes rather than after it, so you do not wait for a rejection.
A PSD to PNG run that passes 30 seconds is killed, and the ImageMagick process is killed with it. A run left behind would sit on one of the machine's two cores until somebody noticed.
No text is read out of the PSD anywhere on this path. Converting a picture to PNG never turns it into words, whatever the picture happens to contain.
ImageMagick was not saturated at sixteen simultaneous conversions: it held 47.5 a second while latency moved from 0.22 s to 0.34 s, and the service memory did not move off 51 MB. That is the measured headroom behind PSD to PNG, not a marketing number.
One PSD file at a time, chosen in the browser. There is nothing else to set up and nothing else on offer.
PSD to PNG: what people ask
What actually converts my PSD file to PNG?
ImageMagick does it, 6.9.12, on a machine we rent and watch. Not a browser trick and not somebody else service: the PSD file is uploaded once, ImageMagick runs once, the PNG comes back, and neither file is kept afterwards.
How long does PSD to PNG take?
On the file the probe used, ImageMagick took under a tenth of a second and wrote 689 bytes of PNG. That is one real measurement on one real PSD file, not an average and not a promise about yours: a larger PSD takes longer, and past 30 seconds the run is stopped.
What do I lose going from PSD to PNG?
The one to know about first: Layers. The PSD document is flattened on the way in, so layer names, masks, adjustment layers and blend modes do not exist on the PNG side.
What happens to my PSD layers?
They are flattened on the way in, and only the composite picture reaches the PNG. Layer names, masks, adjustment layers and blend modes have nowhere to go in a PNG file, so this is an export of what you see rather than a way to move the document itself.
Is PSD to PNG free?
There is a free allowance every month, and one PSD to PNG conversion costs half a credit against it. When the allowance runs out the tool says so and stops, rather than quietly handing you a worse PNG.