
My name is Ivan and I want to make the best photo editor - IvanK_net
https://blog.photopea.com/creating-photopea.html
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cpks
It's an interesting project, but I'd never rely on it without some idea of
what the goals are. Why isn't it open source? What's the business model? Will
you charge me $1000 in two years, once I become dependent? Will it stay online
in two years? Etc.

There's a certain transparency lacking.

It's fine to say "It's free for now, and will be $0.50 per month once mature"
or "We plan to make it free for open images and charge $5,000 for proprietary
use" or whatever. Or "We'll support it by doing machine learning to find naked
images and pay for it by hosing a porn web site." Or "I'm developing this
until I can sell it to the highest bidder."

But there needs to be some answer as to what the goal or business model is.

~~~
skinnyasianboi
"..make designers less dependent on their software (if it suddenly stops
working, you should still have a chance to use your files
somehow)..."(source=link) Makes your "..Will you charge me $1000 in two years,
once I become dependent?.." invalid

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reificator
I don't think it does. Words are words.

~~~
skinnyasianboi
doesn't it? I don't understand edit: ignore the 1000$ part. what i mean is
that one focus of the product is to make designer less dependent because there
won't be a new file format for example. but cpks was talking about the danger
of becoming dependent. thats what i didn't get

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nkg
Almost 400 bugs closed. That shows real discipline and love for your product.
You can be proud of yourself!

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mark-r
I am continually amazed by what's possible in a web browser these days. I'm
also amazed by what a single person can accomplish. That said, this failed my
first test:
[https://www.drupal.org/node/1480428](https://www.drupal.org/node/1480428)

~~~
slaman
Do I have something wrong with my eyes? The first pic looks closer to the
original.

Chrome on a mbp.

~~~
mark-r
Maybe the mbp does some scaling that makes the original look wrong? The
alternating black and white lines making up parts of the letters are supposed
to cancel out to approximately the gray used in the rest of the background.
It's a very clever demonstration of gamma correction.

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userium
Link to the actual product:
[https://www.photopea.com/](https://www.photopea.com/) Nice photo editor. Cool
that you can edit photoshop files online.

~~~
mjaniczek
More importantly, you can edit Sketch files while not using macOS

~~~
hmhrex
You can already do that with Figma (which I highly recommend).

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slaman
This is absolutely amazing. Too many times I'm looking to do simple things and
don't have photoshop, the fact that I just opened this up and instantly felt
at home and could do complex operations without even thinking is honestly
revolutionary.

Every other online editor is a challenge to find, learn and use, and by the
time you have spent 15-20 minutes you realize that you can't do what you want
and need to get a local copy of photoshop anyways.

This is so far ahead of commercial competition in usability and speed I am
astounded. Excellent work, I'm excited for where this takes you.

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steaminghacker
This is impressive, I'm going to start using this. I know that the wish list
must be long, but I'd really like to see things that i CANT do in other
editors, such as PS;

(1) PS (the version i have anyhow) does not support PNG8 with 8bit alpha. This
annoys me a LOT because i have to use another program to generate these from
PNG24 for all my web work. why doesn't PS support this format?? PP to have
this please!

(2) Sometimes i want to quickly add some markup to an image. arrows, callouts,
etc. This is a PITA with PS because it's just TOO complicated. A "simple
editing" page would be cool.

(3) I do a lot of work with APNG (animated PNG) now, which appear to work in
most browsers. most editors won't touch APNG. PP will load and generates each
frame as a layer. would be nice to see the frame boxes and edit/move them,
then recombine. would save a TON of work with APNG authoring.

(4) edit JPG/PNG metadata please.

blue sky stuff: i "waste" a lot of time in PS extracting items from images. I
know this is HARD, but any help here would be a massive boost and worthy of
payment. same goes for "unblurring" as alternative to sharpening. i know this
is technically impossible, but it might be possible to help fix camera shake a
LITTLE BIT, knowing it's shake and not just random blur, etc.

my 2c, but good luck with it!

~~~
IvanK_net
Hi,

(1) Photopea supports ALL PNG images. It can export palletted PNGs with 8 bit
alpha (which PS can not for some reason).

(2) Custom Shape tool can do it in Photopea.

(3) Photopea can load APNG (or GIF) and save it back to APNG (or GIF). I.e.
you can use PP for editing animations. See more here:
[https://www.photopea.com/learn/animations](https://www.photopea.com/learn/animations)

You can suggest and discuss new features here:
[https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues](https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues)

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pc2g4d
Would be good for Photoshop to have some competition. But beware the patent
minefield, my son!

~~~
ArlenBales
Photoshop has at least real competition on macOS. Affinity Photo and
Pixelmator are fantastic, no-subscription alternatives to Photoshop.

~~~
sd8dgf8ds8g8dsg
The pixelmator pro move was a real dick move, though

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dvcrn
You think? I bought the normal Pixelmator for a few dollars years ago and
still receive updates and features. I don't mind them branching out and trying
something new, the normal pixelmator is still top notch

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choward
Is this open source? If not, I'm having trouble in seeing the point of using
this when GIMP exists.

~~~
kolinko
It can be better and have a better interface.

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Theodores
Images can get rather big, I would prefer not to be uploading/downloading big
images to the interwebs, it just makes sense to have it all local for
Photoshop type work.

For this reason I would like to see a version of Photopea that is open source
and can be installed 'docker style' on one's local machine. This would
complement the online version.

Right now, as things stand, I am not ready to move to an online image editor,
the local file access is important and without it I am not going to invest
time learning a new tool.

I am mightily impressed though, incredible effort and from my few minutes with
it, I think you have something very polished for a first reveal. I am fairly
sure the UX is better than Gimp - the often criticised Gimp!

~~~
IvanK_net
There is no upload or download in Photopea, it runs completely inside a
browser. After Photopea.com is loaded, you can disconnect from the internet
and keep using it, open and save your local files. The web platform is just
for the easy distribution and updates (so nobody uses outdated versions).

The UI of PP is very similar to Photoshop and other programs, so should not be
supposed to learn anything new.

~~~
Joeri
Have you considered using appcache or service workers to allow it to launch
while offline?

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zzzcpan
Are we at the point when browser-based photo editors can be suitable for
advanced or professional use for something like this to succeed? I don't think
we are or will be anytime soon. This limits its target audience to novice
users, but they don't really need Photoshop in the browser, but something much
simpler and more approachable. Maybe novice users should be a direction to
consider.

~~~
disordinary
Why wouldn't we be? I can't think of anything that you can do in Photoshop
that you couldn't do with Canvas or WebGL. Add in WASM and it might even
perform better than the native photoshop app.

~~~
maxxxxx
I think you are underestimating how resource intensive advanced editing with
Photoshop is. I think you can get a lot of basic stuff into the browser but
then you'll probably hit a wall.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Resource intensive stuff can be done server side, possibly resulting in better
performance than most desktops. We do that for some tasks on
[https://clara.io](https://clara.io), a 3D editor.

~~~
maxxxxx
Getting the data to the server is difficult when you work with several 1 GB
files. It's OK to do cool stuff in the browser but I think the professional
use cases for Photoshop are better met by native applications written in the
fastest language available.

~~~
bryanlarsen
And in some use cases it's far easier to deal with 1GB files in the cloud than
it is on your desktop. Generate it there, process it there, and then deliver
it from there.

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warrenleow123RF
Ivan, I'm from Inmagine Group. We own Pixlr.com and Vectr.com. Ping me, keen
to talk. warren.leow@123rf.com

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kapad
I used Photopea extensively for a project last month. It's amazing the see the
developer post to hackernews.

My review: Amazing product for the amateur that occasionally dabbles in doing
some photoshop. I used photopea to extract assets from psd that I had to code
out an for which the designer had forgotten to send me the properly exported
assets. I found it a bit slow to load large .psd's, but I tried a few online
and offline tools that claim to work seamlessly with .psds and photopea was by
far the best. And most seamless.

Thanks for the great work Ivan!

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roryisok
I finally used Photopea this morning and I'm blown away. It's like full
photoshop in the browser. It's much more useable (for someone coming from a
photoshop background) than Gimp and actually outperforms it at some tasks. I
spent an hour downloading a trial of Photoshop Elements and I'm just going to
delete it - this does everything I need. It even handles Layer masks!

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roryisok
> works on every device

Doesn't work on my windows phone, but I didn't expect it to. Looking forward
to trying it out tomorrow on the laptop, I literally just spent an hour
downloading a trial of PhotoShop elements 2018 just to splice two photos. I
would much rather use a browser and not have 5gb (!) of Adobe bloat on my SSD

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EGreg
It says it runs on every device. I am on an iPhone, and it complains that
there's not enough RAM for an operation -- gradient on the default new
document.

It wants 1640 MB I think.

That's the only thing, otherwise it's great :)

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kibrad
that's actually a really good tool. I've been looking for ages for a simple
web based tool to do simple editing and couldn't find a decent one. I think
this is an option i'll explore

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minikomi
I'm looking for a way to do non-destructive curves/levels. Without that, it's
not a photoshop killer.

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deepsy
Actually I used that as Linux alternative to Photoshop. I've used Chrome to
export it as stand-alone app.

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ponytech
Is it possible to use a custom TTF font for text?

~~~
IvanK_net
Yes, you can open your own fonts using File - Open. See the last part of
[https://www.photopea.com/learn/text-
layers](https://www.photopea.com/learn/text-layers)

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asar
looks amazing! mind giving some insight about the stack you used to build
this?

~~~
IvanK_net
Thanks! I write my code in Notepad++, then I merge all files into one file
pp.js and minify it with SQZR.js (my owm minifier, performs the same thing as
Closure Compiler, but is about 50x faster).

The result is here:
[https://www.photopea.com/code/pp.js](https://www.photopea.com/code/pp.js)

~~~
ship_it
Off topic but why Notepad++?

~~~
IvanK_net
I accidentally installed it a long time ago, got used to it and did not feel
any need to change until then.

I could use a simpler text editor, but I quite enjoy syntax highlighting,
having multiple files open at once, and Find and Replace tool.

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scotty79
Brings Pixel32 to mind.

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4ad
What happened to it?

~~~
ziotom78
No news since 2009:

[http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/](http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/)

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yohann305
it took me a while to notice the screenshot was the Photopea UI, not
Photoshop's UI. This software is playing with fire (legally speaking)

~~~
plttn
Just looking at it, it appears to me like the layer visibility icon is the
exact same icon.

This is more than playing with fire.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
The tool panel is pretty much identical in its entirety. Layout, which tools
go where, icons, etc.

Edit: Seriously, guys, it is, I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted:

[http://otms.wikispaces.com/file/view/PS_tools_Wiley_Media.jp...](http://otms.wikispaces.com/file/view/PS_tools_Wiley_Media.jpg/469004108/PS_tools_Wiley_Media.jpg)

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vminko
>In terms of complexity, it can be placed next to Adobe Photoshop or GNU GIMP.

This must be a joke.

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pegasuscollins
Have you actually checked the link? This seems to be a reasonable advanced
clone of photoshop in JS; all the basic stuff that you would expect to be
there seems to work. Pretty impressive stuff considering its one guy.

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bvrmn
> all the basic stuff that you would expect to be there seems to work.

Basic stuff is there, yes. But compare it even with a GIMP is a joke.

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minitech
> But compare it even with a GIMP is a joke.

How?

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bvrmn
I guess there is nobody from 163 people who starred subj on GH who works
professionally with photopea. So it's a fun and joke, no more.

