As a photographer, graphic designer or any professional that uses Adobe’s Photoshop, you might have met with a common challenge – opening WebP files. The WebP format is a modern image format developed by Google, providing superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. However, older versions of Photoshop do not natively support this format.
Fortunately, there is a simple workaround to this problem. In this blog post, we will guide you on how to open WebP files in Photoshop.
Download the Plugin
The first step is to download the necessary plugin that will allow Photoshop to open WebP files. This plugin is called ‘WebPShop’ and it’s available for free from the Google Developers site.
The WebPShop plugin is compatible with both Windows and MacOS versions of Photoshop. You can download it directly from Google’s WebPShop GitHub page.
Install the Plugin
Once you have downloaded the plugin, you need to install it into Photoshop.
For Windows users:
Copy the plug-in file WebPShop_0_3_0_Win_x64.8bi to the Photoshop installation folder, usually at:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC 2019\Plug-ins\
For MacOS users:
Copy the plug-in file WebPShop_0_3_0_Mac_x64.plugin to the Photoshop installation folder, usually at:
Applications/Adobe Photoshop CC 2019/Plug-ins/
Restart Photoshop
After you’ve installed the plugin, you’ll need to restart Photoshop if it’s currently running. Once Photoshop has restarted, it should now be able to open WebP files.
Open a WebP File
To open a WebP file, you can simply navigate to File > Open and select your WebP file, just as you would with any other image file.
Conclusion
While it might seem a little convoluted to download and install a plugin just to open a particular image file, given the increasing popularity of the WebP format it is worth your time. With the WebPShop plugin, you can seamlessly work with WebP files right within Photoshop, making your workflow that much easier.
We hope this guide has been helpful in illustrating how to open WebP files in Photoshop.
