Spell check layer overlay for Photoshop and Affinity

A designer is finishing a social media graphic at midnight and ships it with a typo in the headline. It happens constantly. Photoshop's text tool has never had a real spell-check indicator — no red underline, no warning before flatten, nothing. Users have complained about this for years: 'Photoshop has always lacked a very important feature which is the Wrong Spelling indicator.' Affinity Photo has the same problem. The workaround is to mentally proofread or paste into Word, check, paste back.

The reason this gap persists is structural. Spell check in a text-processing app is table stakes. But in a layer-based image editor, every text object is isolated — there's no document-wide text stream to lint against. Adding real spell check would require Adobe to surface a panel that aggregates all text layers, which cuts against the layer metaphor the whole product is built on. It's architecturally inconvenient, not technically impossible. So they've ignored it for two decades.

Designers who produce graphics with text — social media managers, in-house brand teams, small agency designers — routinely export images with errors that are permanent once flattened. A plugin that scans all text layers in the open document, flags misspellings, and lets you jump to and edit each one before export would eliminate a real, concrete risk. The cost of shipping a typo in a brand graphic isn't trivial: it means a reprint, a re-export, or reputational embarrassment in front of a client.

This recurs on every project that contains any text layer. The buyer is often a small in-house design team where the designer is also the proofreader — no separate copy editor is in the loop.

What to build

Build a Photoshop UXP panel (with an Affinity Photo macro/plugin equivalent) that enumerates all text layers in the open document, runs each string through a local spell-check dictionary, highlights layers with errors in the panel, and double-click-navigates to the layer for inline correction before flattening.

Where to start

Launch exclusively for Affinity Photo first — the user base is vocal about missing parity with Photoshop and underserved by third-party plugin developers, so early adoption friction is lower and community word-of-mouth in Affinity forums moves fast.

The hard part

Getting both Photoshop (UXP) and Affinity Photo (macro scripting) coverage from day one is two separate builds — starting with only one cuts your addressable market in half and risks the other vendor closing the gap before you reach the second.

How it makes money

Annual subscription at $9/year per seat, with a free tier limited to five text layer checks per document to drive trial — teams upgrade when they hit the limit on a real project.