My name is Ivan and I want to make the best photo editor | Hacker News Reader

My name is Ivan and I want to make the best photo editor

blog.photopea.com

243 pointsIvanK_net80 comments

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.

It seems like its a cool student project, that's evolving into a potential product.

I would have loved to use this to edit my photos, but unfortunately Adobe's got me by the nuts. I am too heavily invested in Lightroom & Photoshop.

Good luck to you, Ivan!

If you visit https://www.photopea.com/ and click the red "Account" button in the menu bar, you can see some stuff about that.

Currently when a user or team "goes premium", ads are removed. That's it.

There's also a "Distributor Account", which allows you to use Photopea in your own site in an iframe without Photopea branding or ads: https://www.photopea.com/api/accounts#teams

"..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

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

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

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

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

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

Chrome on a mbp.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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!

and a button that says; map this image into sRGB and discard the color profile. please!!

and JPEG option to use arithmetic encoding. The patent expired YEARS ago and is saves 10-20% of the size. for some reason people still aren't using this option for JPEG (compatibility mostly).

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

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

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

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

The pixelmator pro move was a real dick move, though

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

Affinity Photo is also available on Windows, alongside Affinity Designer and soon(tm) Affinity Publisher.

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

It can be better and have a better interface.

You want to crop a photo over the shoulder of a friend's computer. You're going to grab the keyboard and do it in a minute in the browser with this, or spend as much time installing gimp on their computer?

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!

> I am fairly sure the UX is better than Gimp - the often criticised Gimp! Although Gimp's UX sucks, they are really concious of not wanting to just be a photoshop clone. Photopea's UX seems like it has been thought about even less, in that it is just an unashamed direct copy of photoshop (even down to the order of the tools in the left hand panel)

I think its an interesting project, and certainly an achievement for a single person, but its not going to be 'the best photo editor in the world' if it is just trying to be photoshop.

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.

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

> After Photopea.com is loaded, you can disconnect from the internet and keep using it, open and save your local files.

You should open source it then. A browser based photoshop that people can self host or drop in to another website would be a game-changer

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

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!

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!

> 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

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 :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't think you can compare your minifier to the Closure Compiler. For one, it doesn't type check or transpile. But I definitely commend the DIY attitude!

You're admitting to writing this in Notepad++ (on HN to boot) makes me feel obsolete.

I'm the type to constantly look for better tooling/editors/frameworks and get tired of "working" before actually starting the project.

You made this lovely feature-rich photo editor with Notepad++ and what seems Ext.JS and vanilla JS.

You inspired me today. Thank you.

Off topic but why Notepad++?

Why not? It's a great text editor. People code all the time in vim or emacs and nobody complains

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.

You're very talented. Other than photopea, those are some pretty good libs you have in github. Im starring it now and will check it over weekend (Im into image processing and stuff).

Brings Pixel32 to mind.

What happened to it?

No news since 2009:

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/

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.

I think we will see open source editors compiled into WASM soon, and maybe even GIMP one day.

Implementing something like that from scratch is a tremendous task. I'd say impossible for one person if he/she wants to create a Photoshop alternative.

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.

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.

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, a 3D editor.

Then you offload it to the server, which would require a fee or subscribtion to be feasible to host.

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.

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.

WASM is 80-90% native performance and you can do a lot of the grunt work in web workers.

I think you'd be surprised just how fast a web browser is.

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)

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.

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...

Some similarities with Photoshop are necessary to guarantee the PSD support (same layer properties, same layer styles, same adjustments - for adjustment layers). Otherwise, I think that all image editors look quite similar, e.g. https://www.Pixlr.com/editor , Pixelmator, or Affinity Photo

Maybe the play is to get people using it quickly and get bought by Adobe as a way to resolve the legal problem. The owner is putting themselves at a huge disadvantage in negotiation doing this.

look and feel is not copyrightable.

Images and display code, however, are.

https://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2016/02/05/website-html-is...

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

This must be a joke.

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.

> 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.

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

How?

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.

> This must be a joke

How so?

Just a guess, but it's probably because PS and GIMP are huge projects with years of work put into them -by teams of people. This is one guy. Not saying I don't welcome some competition in this area, but there are already tons of PS clones, all with their own niche.

Put it in the context of operating systems, and the guy was saying "This is the next Windows." That would be laughable.

Again though, good for him, fight the giants. But, he's got to expect some eye-rolls and giggles when making such lofty claims.

>Put it in the context of operating systems, and the guy was saying "This is the next Windows." That would be laughable.

That happened in real life!

Consider what the launch of Linux looked like:

http://www.thelinuxdaily.com/2010/04/the-first-linux-announc...

It’s reasonable to think a hobby project won’t get big, and saying it will certainly is talking a big game before it’s actually happened, but even in the OS counterexample you provided, strange things can happen.

Some side projects die, and some side project ends up taking over the majority of the server and all of the supercomputer OS market.

Linux is not the next Windows, and will never be the next Windows. It's been the year of the Linux desktop for twenty years, and it's not been achieved yet. It's very good for the server environment, but it was the next Unix, not the next Windows.

You're wrong, but not in the way that you think.

The concept of a desktop operating system is dying.

Different distros of Linux are very capable desktop operating systems, they are fully featured and competitive with Windows in pretty much every facet. They may not be the next Windows but that doesn't matter. 95% of the use case for an OS now days is the ability to run a modern web browser.

Regardless, you shouldn't dismiss something just because it doesn't have mass adoption. Mass adoption doesn't necessarily reflect the amount of engineering and quality of the platform.

The whole Windows vs Linux debate is pretty much obsolete and becoming less relevant every day.

Linux is already running on more personal computers than Windows. We call them tablets, phones, and think of Android as it's own OS but the reality is it all came from just one guy at the beginning.

If you define "the next Windows" as the operating system that supersedes Windows, then Android (based on the Linux kernel) arguably fits the bill.

But Linux being the next windows or not, the point here is that one guy's hobby project can change the world, so dismissing something because it's just one guy is dangerous. I have seen many cases where one passionate developer has produced something a large corporate team would be proud of.

> probably because PS and GIMP are huge projects with years of work put into them -by teams of people

Just because someone spent millions on a software doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do the same for multiple orders of magnitude less. An extreme example, AT&T spent millions on their Unix, but nowadays many CS university students recreate an OS in the corresponding OS design class.

Going back to Photoshop, PS is written in C++, it contains decades of legacy code, its first version was designed to run on 7MHz CPU with 128 KB RAM. Another things is, it contains rarely used stuff (e.g. legacy formats support) and also stuff irrelevant for web (such as COM automation interface).

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