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Reddit AMA on Photopea, a free alternative to Photoshop used by 1.5M people
- King-Aaron 8y agoI 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 8y ago1.5 Mio. visitors =/= 1.5 Mio. people
- King-Aaron 8y agoSorry for feeling happy for Ivan.
- Torakfirenze 8y agoDisclaimer: 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 8y ago> 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 8y agoIt’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.)
- Old_Thrashbarg 8y agoIt's great seeing open-source web services, that seems quite rare.
- pilif 8y agoThe one under discussion here isn’t open-source
- bufferoverflow 8y agoUnfortunately 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.
- yitchelle 8y agoFor the HN crowd, yes, you are correct. However, would the mass population relate more to paint.net or Photoshop? Maybe that's why he is calling it a Photoshop alternative. I have never heard someone saying "Hey, that photo has been paint dot netted."
- onion2k 8y agoIf you want to target Photoshop userbase, you absolutely must implement 16-bit editing and the ability to open RAW camera files. You're implying that there's only one type of Photoshop user. That's not true. Lots of Photoshop users never touch 16-bit or Raw files.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bufferoverflow 8y agoI'm implying that it's not a Photoshop alternative. You might as well call MS Paint that, because by your logic it works for some users.
- einr 8y agoIt's a Photoshop alternative, not a Photoshop replacement. A bike can be an alternative to a car, but does not replace all its functions.
- maweki 8y ago
- pmarin 8y agoCan someone add the AMA word to the title to denote the author is answering lots of questions.
- dang 8y agoOk, added above.
- Bishonen88 8y agowhilst 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 8y ago>I'm not sure how I'd felt Adobe is a company, not a person. It can not feel.
- choot 8y agoIt can sue tho.
- cyborgx7 8y agoYep. That is the difference between ethics and legality.
- bobcostas55 8y agoYou might enjoy this essay by Eric Schwitzgebel: _If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious_ http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140130a.htm http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...
- cyborgx7 8y agoYou were right. I did enjoy this essay. I disagree with it. And even if I didn't, there are other reasons it wouldn't change my ethical outlook on the situation. But it is interesting nontheless.
- quickthrower2 8y agoWelcome to business.
- 8y ago
- sidcool 8y agoWhat is the tech stack used?
- anonu 8y agoIn the AMA he says it's all client side JavaScript. Server run costs are 20$ in one year.
- sidcool 8y agoThis is a pretty cool tool for a one person team.
- anjc 8y agoWell 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.
- aw3c2 8y ago> 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.
- yread 8y agoThere is quite some MIT-licensed stuff here https://github.com/photopea?tab=repositories https://github.com/photopea?tab=repositories He says he opensourced about 30% of it.
- teddyh 8y agoThis food contains 30% non-meat products! Vegans, rejoice!
- throwawaylolx 8y ago>I cannot imagine doing anything remotely Photoshop-related in a web browser... Really? They already made Lightroom in browser making use of WASM.
- mackwerk 8y ago> 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 8y ago> 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.
- jillesvangurp 8y agoInteresting 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
- Philomath 8y agoI 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)
- ggregoire 8y agoYou are also more efficient when you work on something you love.
- elaus 8y agoIt only took him two hours after the feature request was posted until the change went live. I guess that kind of speed is only possible if you're a solo developer that takes full responsibility for his product and who is product owner, dev-op, UX expert and QA all in one person.
- sophistication 8y agoNotably he was also answering other questions in the AMA, so it possibly only took him 2 minutes. It is not a difficult feature to implement anyhow, it probably went like this: vim tools/Text.js self.addEventListener('click', function (e) { if (e.detail === 3) { self.selectAll(); } }); :wq git add tools/Text.js git commit -m "Add triple click select all" git push origin master Done.
- mcintyre1994 8y agoNeat, I didn't know about detail on mouseclick events :)
- AltruisticGap 8y agoThe main view is a canvas. Regardless, my hunch is event delegation would be more performant.
- chrisper 8y agoI recently bought Affinity Photo. Yes, it's not free, but it is a decent alternative to Photoshop.
- dotancohen 8y agoThis 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 8y agoProbably the more similar interface to Photoshop. I personally can't stand Gimp interface. Also commercial support.
- dotancohen 8y agoHave 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 8y agoWell 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 8y agoI see, that looks like a good forum. Thanks.
- arsalanb 8y agoSeems like a herculean effort! +1 to the lad for making something that is seemingly so complex all by himself!
- choot 8y agoAnyone 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?
- test1235 8y agoit's not electron[1], if that's what you're asking - it's all in the browser. Uses Ext.JS[2]. No idea what the backend is using. 1. https://github.com/electron/electron https://github.com/electron/electron 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext_JS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext_JS
- Torakfirenze 8y agoAccording to builtwith.com - PHP https://builtwith.com/detailed/photopea.com https://builtwith.com/detailed/photopea.com
- pier25 8y agoFrom 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.
- JunaidBhai 8y agoFantastic 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.
- Rjevski 8y agoAny chance mods can replace the link to "old.reddit.com"? The "new" Reddit is extremely slow and makes my little MacBook sad.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bigzyg33k 8y agoIf you're signed in, you can change your user preferences to use old reddit by default
- epage 8y agoHeh, 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 8y agohttps://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/40897-old-reddit-please https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/40897-old-reddit-please
- rofo1 8y agoTry this on Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
- duiker101 8y agoRecently 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.
- landsman 8y agoLove it!
- tambourine_man 8y agoMaybe 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 8y agoPhotopea exists for five years, and it was only in the last year, when Google started to place Photopea in front of flash-based editors.
- Confiks 8y agoAs 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 8y agoIsn’t Krita a drawing program? That’s akin to Adobe Illustrator, not Photoshop.
- gmueckl 8y agoNo, 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 8y ago> 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.
- zimmund 8y agoI agree, Krita is more aimed at drawing than image manipulation (but as others said it's not akin to Illustrator)
- blue4 8y agohis hacker news post from a year ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924402
- IvanK_net 8y agoHi 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!
- myth_buster 8y agoGreat job building a product people use! I was curious that given its an JS/Client side app, do you have any plans of porting it to Electron[0] to make it a cross platform app? The reason I'm asking is coz editing my photos online makes me a bit nervous. For you the benefit may be that you don't have to test for different browsers and handle the compatibility nightmare. 0: https://electronjs.org/ https://electronjs.org/
- Alupis 8y agoI'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 8y agoYou are experiencing Frequency Illusion sometimes referred to as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/baader-meinhof-phenomenon.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human.... Once I learned about Baader-Meinhof I started to notice it everywhere. ;)
- mehrdadn 8y agoThis looks amazing. Just one question: what are the privacy guarantees? Will images, metadata, etc. always stay local and never be sent to another machine?
- johndough 8y ago
- tx21 8y agogimp.org
- RomanPushkin 8y agoHey 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 8y ago> 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 8y agoSure. But I'm speaking from the user's perspective. Who knows, maybe it's important for Ivan what small little people are concerned about.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kup0 8y agoWow, 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
- prince005 8y agoI 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.
- choicenotchance 8y agoNow, if only a good alternative to Reddit existed.