Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions • Hacker News Board

Re: Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions

#61

Post by blacksmith_tb » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 9:11 PM UTC

Normille wrote: post #18

farisjarrah wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

photopea is one of the best examples of a web application imo. Its a full featured image editing software just running in your browser. No sign up or login required and you can just upload and quickly work off a local file for your computer. You just fire it up and start working.

Agreed. As a longtime Photoshop user, I was gobsmacked the first time I used Photopea at just how good it was. Gobsmacked even more when I found out it was all written in JS and completely running in the browser with no server backend. EDIT: apparently my enthusiasm is outdated. I just tried to load the site in Firefox [latest version] and got the following error: "Your browser is too old (no WebAssembly). Please, up…

Hmm, are you on an old version of FF? I just tried it in 106.0.1 on Ubuntu and it worked fine (even with uBlock and some other adblockers).

Re: Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions

#62

Post by arriu » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 9:12 PM UTC

prox wrote: post #30

tomcam wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see posts like this my immediate reflex is to remind the complainant to have a little respect for the creators. But it’s really hard to disagree with this…

Sorry but the creators have such a disdain for any form user experience enhancements that I cannot give them a pass.

I think many of us really wanted it to succeed and tried to love it. Unfortunately, it just isn’t what most people want.

Re: Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions

#63

Post by recursive » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 9:13 PM UTC

Daunk wrote: post #56

I've tried Photopea a million times, but the interface always messes up somehow. I just tried it, and sure enough, a huge grey box is stuck on the right side of the screen and can't be removed.

Github is wrong then. Check the blog for a more authoritative source.

https://blog.photopea.com/

Re: Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions

#64

Post by Hamuko » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 9:13 PM UTC

bolt7469 wrote: post #31

FortiDude wrote: post #13

Photopea should be GIMP's permanent embarrassment. I can't believe running a webapp offline written by a single person is more viable than a native program developed by a vast amount of contributors over decades.

Photopea's killer feature is the fact that it, for the most part, directly copies Photoshop's implementations of features. There's no learning curve because it's basically the same. On the other hand, GIMP still doesn't have Smart Objects or Adjustment Layers.

I use Photopea at work precisely because of this. I know how to use Photoshop, but I don't have a license for Photoshop as an engineer, but I do sometimes need it. Photopea fills that role perfectly and it's almost a perfect drop-in replacement.

Re: Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions

#65

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 9:13 PM UTC

sdfhbdf wrote: post #5

There is little to no time spent in this article on how photopea is monetized. I even went to the product itself to find out but couldn’t, at least on mobile. Is there some subscription? What do you pay for? Genuinely asking since I used it a few times and never noticed any payment nagging.

Ads, premium subscriptions to turn off the ads, and licensing to other sites that then host it under different names with more ads.

Re: Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions

#66

Post by pier25 » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #3

> But it has a few problems. It takes up a ton of computing power and battery, which makes it difficult to use on old/slow computers. And the biggest thing, cost. Given it's a Javascript program I'm not sure how Photopea solves those problems with Adobe Photoshop other than cost.

PS performance has been getting worse over the years. I've been using it for almost 20 years and it really peaked with CS6.

The core engine might be fast for computational intensive stuff (eg: radial blur, liquify, etc) but the UI itself is tremendously clunky.

I used to love using PS (and the whole Adobe suite) but now I dread it.

Re: Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions

#67

Post by troymc » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

jewel wrote: post #41

troymc wrote: post #29

I recently switched back to using Ubuntu as my desktop OS, and was intrigued to see that Photopea was the default app to open many file types, including PDF. I thought that was odd because while Photopea is free-of-charge, it's not completely open source [1]. [1] https://github.com/photopea/photopea

It's not the default on my Ubuntu, and I don't even see it in apt or snap. I wonder if perhaps you've confused it with another program, or are running an Ubuntu derivative.

Ubuntu 22.04 with everything default.

When I go to the "Files" app and open a PDF, it opens the PDF in my default web browser at photopea.com, i.e. it's not an "app on my machine" so it doesn't show up in the apt list. Photopea does show up us as one of the options when I click on "Show Applications."

Re: Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions

#68

Post by Firmwarrior » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

colonelspace wrote: post #32

bolt7469 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photopea's killer feature is the fact that it, for the most part, directly copies Photoshop's implementations of features. There's no learning curve because it's basically the same. On the other hand, GIMP still doesn't have Smart Objects or Adjustment Layers.

No adjustment layers? That is like photoshop 101. That's pretty embarrassing for GIMP.

I didn't know what those were, but going by https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/adjustment-layers.h...

You can do all the same stuff in the gimp, but it's just a little more laborious (or a lot more laborious if you're used to photoshop already I guess). The gimp lets you easily do all the same transformations, copy and reapply transformations, etc. It seems like the adjustment layer keeps the original image and the transformations to make it easier to repeatedly tinker with those adjustments and reapply them more quickly, though.

Re: Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions

#69

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

Daunk wrote: post #56

I've tried Photopea a million times, but the interface always messes up somehow. I just tried it, and sure enough, a huge grey box is stuck on the right side of the screen and can't be removed.

That sounds like it might be an ad partially blocked by your ad blocker?