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If you want to avoid Adobe software, but are familiar with photoshop, Photopea [1] is a great choice. It supports psd files (natively, without any export/impor

by lf-non 2y ago

If you want to avoid Adobe software, but are familiar with photoshop, Photopea [1] is a great choice. It supports psd files (natively, without any export/import), has similar shortcuts, can import photoshop brushes and overall comes across as a well designed software. Their subreddit has a great helpful community too. I am not a professional photo editor or graphic designer, but I have been using it a few times every week for last year or so and have yet to come across any bugs. [1] photopea.com

mantas 2y ago
Photopea is AWESOME. Especially PSD support. I can't recommend it enough.
carnewal 2y ago
Agreed, I'm not a designer but I do need to be able to edit images from time to time. I tried gimp but it just feels ... clunky? Nowadays I just open up Photopea in the browser. No installs and it just works very well
Nition 2y ago
Photopea is very close to Photoshop in a broswer. It's amazing really.
quitit 2y ago
Photoshop falls into a category where people assume it's the best because it's used by professionals - and so that's what they want to be using. The problem is that people assume professional graphics is just drawing pictures. (Society in general has a pretty low expectation/understanding of what this industry does, this is also fuelling the hyperventilating over AI, but that's a different discussion.) Using Photoshop without a specific professional objective is a trap: That's like driving a tractor in the city. Photoshop is only the best for specific professional workflows, and to date I'm still to find any alternative that can replace it. (I'm happy to elaborate on that.) The way Photoshop serves its market is quite specific and just casually loading up Photopea now I can see many parts of the app that would trivially frustrate a production workflow. I'm happy to list these for anyone curious. This is typical for photoshop alternatives, this doesn't make them bad, often it makes the app more useful for casual users by hand-waving away complex, industry-specific concepts. If you find yourself using Photoshop and it doesn't feel like it's actively helping you achieve your ambitions, then I encourage that you reach out to others in your creative space to learn what software other people are using, like you all are in this thread today. The graphics market has a litany of apps to serve different graphics objectives. These each have interesting features and workflows that are better suited to different audiences and, as mentioned, they also benefit from removing needless complexity and control.
- ler_ 2y ago
  > The way Photoshop serves its market is quite specific and just casually loading up Photopea now I can see many parts of the app that would trivially frustrate a production workflow. I'm happy to list these for anyone curious. This did make me curious. What problems did you notice? I know next to nothing about image editing software. However, I always like to understand how someone judges the usefulness of a given thing, assuming he or she has enough background knowledge / experience on a subject.
  - quitit 2y ago
    A non-expert workflow for photoshop is editing images in the CMYK colour mode and handling the use of specials such as pantone colours or custom ink mixes. Photopea has a CMYK mode, which is great, but despite the document being in CMYK mode the swatches adjacent are RGB. A useful approach would be to automatically convert RGB swatches to the destination colour space, since that's how they look when one uses them. I also noticed the layer blending modes were undertaken in the RGB colour space rather than CMYK despite the document colour mode setting. This difference produces different results especially if using the transparency modes screen and multiply which behave a fair bit differently in the CMYK colour mode versus the RGB colour mode. A person that opens the Photopea PSD in photoshop would thus see a different result which the Photopea user did not intend. Next I noticed that the channel management for the CMYK plates and specials provided no ability to set or manage the specials plate. For example when utilising a pantone colour one would need to establish an additional plate and input the LAB value for the ink, there didn't seem to be any way of doing that, however it supported what was already in the sample PSD file I loaded into it. I didn't delve into colour profiles and control over dot gain, but that is another aspect which is usually absent in Photoshop alternatives. Also just rehashing that the above is not expert-level, anyone in the industry would be familiar with these concepts and find themselves needing to manage them for production output. This is what I mean when I say to people "you don't need photoshop, get something better", non-industry people don't need to be fussing over whether the document intention should be perceptual or absolute (or seldom used middle-grounds), what is the output LPI, or device pixel requirements, what byte order is supported by the RIP, what their ink weights maximums are, or adjusting screen angles to deter plate mottling.

by lf-non 2y ago

mantas 2y ago

Photopea is AWESOME. Especially PSD support. I can't recommend it enough.

carnewal 2y ago

Agreed, I'm not a designer but I do need to be able to edit images from time to time. I tried gimp but it just feels ... clunky? Nowadays I just open up Photopea in the browser. No installs and it just works very well

Nition 2y ago

Photopea is very close to Photoshop in a broswer. It's amazing really.

quitit 2y ago

Photoshop falls into a category where people assume it's the best because it's used by professionals - and so that's what they want to be using. The problem is that people assume professional graphics is just drawing pictures. (Society in general has a pretty low expectation/understanding of what this industry does, this is also fuelling the hyperventilating over AI, but that's a different discussion.) Using Photoshop without a specific professional objective is a trap: That's like driving a tractor in the city. Photoshop is only the best for specific professional workflows, and to date I'm still to find any alternative that can replace it. (I'm happy to elaborate on that.) The way Photoshop serves its market is quite specific and just casually loading up Photopea now I can see many parts of the app that would trivially frustrate a production workflow. I'm happy to list these for anyone curious. This is typical for photoshop alternatives, this doesn't make them bad, often it makes the app more useful for casual users by hand-waving away complex, industry-specific concepts. If you find yourself using Photoshop and it doesn't feel like it's actively helping you achieve your ambitions, then I encourage that you reach out to others in your creative space to learn what software other people are using, like you all are in this thread today. The graphics market has a litany of apps to serve different graphics objectives. These each have interesting features and workflows that are better suited to different audiences and, as mentioned, they also benefit from removing needless complexity and control.

ler_ 2y ago
> The way Photoshop serves its market is quite specific and just casually loading up Photopea now I can see many parts of the app that would trivially frustrate a production workflow. I'm happy to list these for anyone curious. This did make me curious. What problems did you notice? I know next to nothing about image editing software. However, I always like to understand how someone judges the usefulness of a given thing, assuming he or she has enough background knowledge / experience on a subject.
- quitit 2y ago
  A non-expert workflow for photoshop is editing images in the CMYK colour mode and handling the use of specials such as pantone colours or custom ink mixes. Photopea has a CMYK mode, which is great, but despite the document being in CMYK mode the swatches adjacent are RGB. A useful approach would be to automatically convert RGB swatches to the destination colour space, since that's how they look when one uses them. I also noticed the layer blending modes were undertaken in the RGB colour space rather than CMYK despite the document colour mode setting. This difference produces different results especially if using the transparency modes screen and multiply which behave a fair bit differently in the CMYK colour mode versus the RGB colour mode. A person that opens the Photopea PSD in photoshop would thus see a different result which the Photopea user did not intend. Next I noticed that the channel management for the CMYK plates and specials provided no ability to set or manage the specials plate. For example when utilising a pantone colour one would need to establish an additional plate and input the LAB value for the ink, there didn't seem to be any way of doing that, however it supported what was already in the sample PSD file I loaded into it. I didn't delve into colour profiles and control over dot gain, but that is another aspect which is usually absent in Photoshop alternatives. Also just rehashing that the above is not expert-level, anyone in the industry would be familiar with these concepts and find themselves needing to manage them for production output. This is what I mean when I say to people "you don't need photoshop, get something better", non-industry people don't need to be fussing over whether the document intention should be perceptual or absolute (or seldom used middle-grounds), what is the output LPI, or device pixel requirements, what byte order is supported by the RIP, what their ink weights maximums are, or adjusting screen angles to deter plate mottling.