
Reddit AMA on Photopea, a free alternative to Photoshop used by 1.5M people - arikr
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_alternative_to_photoshop_that_is/
======
Philomath
I love a comment in the Reddit post where a user asks if he takes feature
requests and proposes one (triple click on text to select it). The guy,
shortly after, answers saying that it's a good idea, and that he just
implemented it.

I don't love it because of the attitude of the developer (which is great too),
I love that it reminds me how fast it is to solo develop something and how
much more complicated it gets when a team grows.

(We are a small team of 15 devs in my company and it's already super
complicated to be that efficient)

~~~
smnscu
Can't a CI/CD pipeline + various processes be good enough to achieve a similar
efficiency for under-100-engineers companies? Honest question - because I'm
pretty sure I've heard some people claim similarly fast "idea to production"
times.

~~~
barrkel
Usually, feature requests go through a product manager who can do analysis,
integrate with road map, prioritize against other features, figure out if
there's overlap with another feature (maybe one coming up soon) and so it
shouldn't actually be implemented, etc.

There may be some communication between product and design to figure out how
it should look and feel.

Then it'll go into a sprint most probably, but not the current sprint, because
that would change the scope and affect estimates and possible delivery
timelines. You'd only change the sprint scope if the team is running out of
work to do or there's a major customer request or other panic.

There will be some measure of QA, ideally. Some people fly by the seat of
their pants, and rely on fixing things in production if it breaks in
production. This is using your customers as QA. Can work if you roll out
gradually and are very responsive to any reports of regressions.

All in all, this is unlikely to happen in less than a couple of weeks. The
processes are designed for predictable, consistent delivery and to minimize
surprise. Shortening the chain will mean less integrated decision making and
will increase the amount of surprise and inconsistency in the product and its
delivery.

~~~
sophistication
The processes are also designed such that people do not feel overstepped and
ignored. After all, most things in life are about social status, or more
immediately about salary status and job position.

If someone secretly implements an awesome feature, others might be envious as
it does not seem deserved if their idea did not receive the same level of
scrutiny by the usual processes as other decisions did.

Theoretically, it probably won't cause much chaos _at all_ if programmers are
allowed to add small GUI tweaks and the product likely benefits from it.

The degree to which this would work probably depends a lot on the extent to
which the programmers have reached Kegan level 5, so practically it probably
won't work all that well.

[http://i.imgur.com/K4AVFbW.png](http://i.imgur.com/K4AVFbW.png)

~~~
sidlls
It's pretty rare for someone to secretly implement an awesome feature. Usually
the way that works is as you hint at: someone who already has high social
status in the organization gets a lot of leeway to do his own thing while
everyone else is constrained to the usual process.

The envy isn't about the awesome feature: it's about the fact that this
developer gets even more attention and positive notice from leadership by
means that aren't available to other workers due to social status (rather than
merit).

------
bufferoverflow
Unfortunately it is not an alternative to Photoshop. It's more of an
alternative to Paint.net. Photoshop is vast, it's absolutely huge. It has all
kinds of features that will take decades to implement for one talented person.
Additionally, it relies on GPU acceleration for many common tasks.

If you want to target Photoshop userbase, you absolutely must implement 16-bit
editing and the ability to open RAW camera files. This project can't do
either, while GIMP does.

It's still impressive what he did.

~~~
Slartie
This thing targets people who started using Photoshop back in the day when it
still wasn't a subscription service for basic and mildly advanced image
editing tasks, and who thus grew accustomed to the Photoshop UI. I personally
know several such people, some are trying to switch to alternatives (like
myself, I'm switching to Affinity Photo), but the others still use the same
(sometimes pirated) Photoshop CS3 or CS4 version they have used since forever,
because it's more than enough for their needs, and the usual reason why they
stick to it is that they know how to get stuff done with the familiar UI.

Imitating this basic UI with nearly 100% accuracy is a stroke of genius. Not
even Affinity Photo, which is clearly taking lots of ideas from the Photoshop
UI as well, comes close to this level of familiarity. Photopea truly feels as
if it was Photoshop from 10 years ago, which is exactly the Photoshop that
lots of people not working in the graphics industry, where an Adobe
subscription is mandatory, love.

~~~
lunchables
This describes me. Started using Photoshop around 4, knew it inside and out.
Then, over the years, Photoshop far outgrew me (and my needs). This is a
wonderful alternative that probably does 95% of what I need in Photoshop.

~~~
folkrav
Pretty much in a similar case to yours. I started playing with Photoshop with
a 5.0 license my dad bought back around 1998, and used that same version for
years. I pretty much still use the same features I did back then, and to me
all those modern versions makes no difference to my workflow whatsoever. With
time I just learned to do things a bit more efficiently like to use adjustment
layers instead of destructive transformations, etc. That same 5.0 version
would probably still meet the majority of what I would do with Photoshop.

------
IvanK_net
Hi guys, I am Ivan (author of Photopea) and I would like to thank you all.

I used to post here about Photopea in the past without much success. Now, I
see a others posting it, and it makes me happy :) Thanks for all your support!

~~~
Alupis
I've been using Photopea for the past few weeks since my installed version of
Photoshop is too old to modify some of the more recent PSD's I come across.

Just wanted to say thanks for an excellent product!

(It's real funny how you discover something for the first time, then start
seeing it everywhere like it should have been obvious before!)

~~~
ahsteele
You are experiencing _Frequency Illusion_ sometimes referred to as the Baader-
Meinhof phenomenon: [https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-
mind/human...](https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-
brain/baader-meinhof-phenomenon.htm). Once I learned about Baader-Meinhof I
started to notice it everywhere. ;)

------
Confiks
As for a fully open-source Photoshop alternative, Krita [1] goes a long way.
It does however have some major UX problems in minor areas. For example,
yesterday I tried updating the font size of an existing text layer, and just
couldn't get a proper selection on the text.

They had a funding crisis last year [2], but currently seem to be doing well
with two paid developers. They could really use your (one-time) donation
however [3].

[1] [https://krita.org/en/](https://krita.org/en/)

[2] [https://krita.org/en/item/krita-foundation-in-
trouble/](https://krita.org/en/item/krita-foundation-in-trouble/)

[3] [https://krita.org/en/support-us/donations/](https://krita.org/en/support-
us/donations/)

~~~
orev
Isn’t Krita a drawing program? That’s akin to Adobe Illustrator, not
Photoshop.

~~~
gmueckl
No, Illustrator is a vector drawing program. Inkscape or Corel Draw (if people
even remember that) are direct competitors.

Krita has to to be compared to Photoshop because both are working on
rasterized images. While Krita emphasizes drawing tools in its UI while
Photoshop exposes manipulation tools more prominently, both programs aim to
cover both sets of features. And Krita's core is actually much, much more
advanced than what you would expect from a drawing program. I would actually
love to see a UI for Krita that focuses more on manipulation, just to placate
the "it's just for drawing" crowd.

~~~
e12e
> Corel Draw (if people even remember that)

Apparently the latest release of CorelDRAW came out in April this year. I'm a
little surprised - I thought they'd disappeared. But apparently you can both
buy a license, and rent it by the month.

------
RomanPushkin
Hey Ivan, usually what happens to this kind of a project is corporation knocks
to your door and offers a pile of cash you can't reject. Since your project
isn't libre open source, it would be nice if you can consider this option.
Photopea is great! And it covers all my needs. I would like to teach my son
using your product. But I want to be sure that one day I won't see Adobe logo
at the top.

Open source under licenses like AGPLv3 will prevent other companies/developers
using it for generating the revenue without full source code disclosure (and
you'll be able to sell exceptions).

Unfortunately, nowadays the threat of acquiring and killing the product is
more realistic than ever.

~~~
lee
> this kind of a project is corporation knocks to your door and offers a pile
> of cash you can't reject

I hope that actually does happen for Ivan. Wouldn't that be a great outcome
for him? He spent a considerable amount of time on it.

~~~
RomanPushkin
Sure. But I'm speaking from the user's perspective. Who knows, maybe it's
important for Ivan what small little people are concerned about.

------
Rjevski
Any chance mods can replace the link to "old.reddit.com"? The "new" Reddit is
extremely slow and makes my little MacBook sad.

~~~
bigzyg33k
If you're signed in, you can change your user preferences to use old reddit by
default

~~~
epage
Heh, I wish. It worked for a while but then I got force-logged out for a
password change and now it flip flops between the modes and errors when I
enable old mode.

~~~
pinebox
[https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/40897-old-reddit-
please](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/40897-old-reddit-please)

------
Torakfirenze
Disclaimer: OP changed post title from "I made x y z" to "Redditor made x y z"
so my question seems to have been rendered (get it?) invalid.

This is really impressive. I will be using this in the future - great work.

Are you at all worried about Photoshop coming after you for this? I know
nothing about what patents they have etc., but it _is_ very similar to PS in
design and functionality.

~~~
petepete
> but it _is_ very similar to PS in design and functionality

Thankfully that didn't stop Serif with Affinity Photo. The user interfaces and
tools are so similar many tutorials don't even need modification.

~~~
jacobolus
It’s pretty depressing how many image editors are just incomplete clones of
Photoshop without any original ideas.

There are a _lot_ of parts of Photoshop which could be radically improved if
Adobe weren’t constrained by needing to preserve existing customer workflows
from circa 1995 and build off decades of legacy code / organizational inertia.
Most of the low-level decisions in Photoshop are based on academic research
from the 1970s, reimplemented in the early 1990s to match mid-range computer
workstations and typical images of that time.

Many new image editors have basically zero thought put into design or core
image processing infrastructure, and are just exact copies of Adobe’s ideas,
without considering that computers and imaging have changed dramatically in
the past 2 decades.

(To be fair, coming up with new ideas and then polishing them to the point
they are ready for customers is really hard: it takes vision, cross-
disciplinary expertise, new research work, multiple attempts at implementation
when some ideas don’t work out, integration effort fitting ideas together,
etc. Clones are a lot easier.)

~~~
adobeeee
Well said and great argument on both sides but you missed the point that
nobody wants to spend time learning another tool. Most experts are very quick
at things. Unless you know you're going to beat adobe 100% and with the entire
feature set you wont try an innovative way.

~~~
jacobolus
Sure, but if your main criterion is “I am a professional expert and I know
Photoshop inside and out”, then the obvious thing to do is just use Photoshop.
The price is not really a problem for people doing serious work.

------
aw3c2
> www.Photopea.com , which is an advanced image editor, that works in a web
> browser

Free to use, not free software. I cannot imagine doing anything remotely
Photoshop-related in a _web browser_...

> There was about 1.5 millions of visitors in October

Visitors do not equal users. If those were even 1% of that it would be
impressive.

~~~
mackwerk
> I cannot imagine doing anything remotely Photoshop-related in a web
> browser...

I do that all the time, we might have different definitions of what photoshop-
related is, but I often use pixlr.com to cut faces out of photos and put them
on other things. I will check out his product

~~~
batty_alex
> we might have different definitions of what photoshop-related is, but I
> often use pixlr.com to cut faces out of photos and put them on other things.

This is a tiny fraction of what Photoshop does. Even back in the mid-2000s,
when I was a graphics designer, I rarely used Photoshop for simple work like
that. It would have been the equivalent of using a nail gun for a single nail
to hang a photo frame. You could do it, but the $10 hammer in the shed will
work just fine.

------
tambourine_man
Maybe this Reddit AMA helped it's SEO rank, as it's now first for “Photoshop
in the browser”, but I've been searching for something like this for years and
even entertained the idea of building one myself someday, but Google would
only find old, Flash based stuff.

Really nice work, I'll check it out more thoroughly when I have the time.

~~~
IvanK_net
Photopea exists for five years, and it was only in the last year, when Google
started to place Photopea in front of flash-based editors.

------
King-Aaron
I started using Photopea just for fun several months ago, because it seemed
like a really cool project even if it just seemed like a bit of a novelty at
the time.

The fact that the author now has 1.5M + users and just got a reddit hug of
death is super impressive. Well done to Ivan.

~~~
progfix
1.5 Mio. visitors =/= 1.5 Mio. people

~~~
King-Aaron
Sorry for feeling happy for Ivan.

~~~
bulditand
Then why not 15M, the more the happier!

------
arsalanb
Seems like a herculean effort! +1 to the lad for making something that is
seemingly so complex all by himself!

------
chrisper
I recently bought Affinity Photo. Yes, it's not free, but it is a decent
alternative to Photoshop.

~~~
dotancohen
This looks good, thanks.

If one has already decided that they are no using the industry-standard
Photoshop, then what would be the advantage to using Affinity instead of Gimp,
which has the price and community advantage?

~~~
chrisper
Probably the more similar interface to Photoshop. I personally can't stand
Gimp interface.

Also commercial support.

~~~
dotancohen
Have you tried Gimp's single-window mode? I'm not familiar with Photoshop but
I hated Gimp's old windowed interface. Single-window is what made it usable by
me, and in fact I don't see how the UI could now be any better considering
what it does.

As for commercial support, with the notable exceptions of Amazon and
Rackspace, I cannot think of any commercial support that has been worth
anything more than a good FAQ documentation would be. Can one really ask
beginner questions on their commercial support, like one could do in a forum
with a large user base?

~~~
chrisper
Well you can use their support forum. They also have good tutorials.

[https://forum.affinity.serif.com/](https://forum.affinity.serif.com/)

Personally, I just bought it because I wanted to support an Adobe alternative.

~~~
dotancohen
I see, that looks like a good forum. Thanks.

------
JunaidBhai
Fantastic product! Loved it! This might not be the next big breakthrough in
the design domain. But definitely a pain-point solver for budding designers
who might not be able to bear cost of buying software licenses for their
hobbies or learning.

We run a design service ([http://draftss.com](http://draftss.com)) and we
understand the significance of the amount paid for licenses every year. This
isn't limited to learning just Photoshop; instead there are abundant number of
softwares like Illustrator, CorelDraw, Indesign, Sketch, etc. that are
necessary for designers to be familiar with. The cost makes it difficult for
budding designers to spend time in learning multiple softwares efficiently.

------
anjc
Well done to the guy. What an interesting time, when a person can spend 5
hours per day for 3 years creating a product that has 1.5M visitors per month,
but makes just about enough money from it to not be poor. Hopefully he can
think of a better monetization scheme.

------
jillesvangurp
Interesting project. It works reasonably well and should be fine for light
editing. It's comparable to other photoshop clones I've seen. It has a lot of
the core features of photoshop and copies its UX. Of course Photoshop has more
features, is probably a bit faster with certain things, and probably has some
algorithmic edges. Nevertheless, impressive effort.

I'm guessing a lot of oss photography libraries and tools may be ported to
wasm eventually. SIMD and threading are going to be two big enablers for this.
That's also something that may benefit this project. T

------
blue4
his hacker news post from a year ago,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924402](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924402)

------
kup0
Wow, this is maybe the best "online editor" experience I've had so far... Very
impressed.

Curious if there could be a way to use it completely offline (on a non-
connected laptop while on a trip or something), but that would be a rare
occurrence for me.

Since it all happens client-side, this may be my new "I need a quick edit"
editor

------
duiker101
Recently I started using Gravit Designer as my go-to graphic editor of choice.
It's free to use and really fast for being a web app! It does vector graphics
and has most of the features I need.

------
prince005
I have been using Photopea for a while now, especially since I moved to a
Linux machine from Windows and being a Photoshop enthusiast I would say, this
is the best alternative outh there.

------
sidcool
This is a pretty cool tool for a one person team.

------
sidcool
What is the tech stack used?

~~~
anonu
In the AMA he says it's all client side JavaScript. Server run costs are 20$
in one year.

~~~
sidcool
That's pretty cool. My question then should be, what JS libraries?

~~~
pier25
From what I saw in the AMA it's 99% vanilla.

He only uses Paper.js for computing vector graphics booleans.

------
landsman
Love it!

------
tx21
gimp.org

------
pmarin
Can someone add the AMA word to the title to denote the author is answering
lots of questions.

~~~
dang
Ok, added above.

------
choot
Anyone who can tell what kind of tech stack can be used to make smth like this
possible? I am assuming same stack which VSCode uses?

~~~
pier25
From the AMA it's all client side and apparently he didn't use any popular
library (eg: React, Angular, etc).

He claims he uses Paper.js only for computing vector graphics booleans.

------
Old_Thrashbarg
It's great seeing open-source web services, that seems quite rare.

~~~
pilif
The one under discussion here isn’t open-source

------
Bishonen88
whilst I don't really care so much about those things, the layout, icons and
nomenclature of most functions seems to be _eghmmm_ 'borrowed' directly from
Adobe. I'm not sure how I'd felt if I'd invest millions and years of research
into something, and someone else would re-create ~50% of it and make it
free...

~~~
cyborgx7
>I'm not sure how I'd felt

Adobe is a company, not a person. It can not feel.

~~~
choot
It can sue tho.

~~~
cyborgx7
Yep. That is the difference between ethics and legality.

