Greetings from across the pond near Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. It just doesn't get better than EC. It just doesn't. Such a treasure. Thanks for all your hard work.
Gimp is my preferred Photoshop alternative. I haven’t used Photoshop a lot in my life, as you need to pay for it of course, and the only times I used was during some of my Middles School classes. Gimp allows me to mess and play with screenshots, making art and change them to make them look different! People say that it’s missing some things, but it doesn’t bother me that much since I’ve grown up with Gimp more than Photoshop. Gimp is a must have Linux application to those looking to make great photo edits!
And yet GIMP still can't handle simple vector layers and masks. It's been decades and GIMP still can't do basic vector image editing operations! And don't get me started on the awfulness of Inkscape. Photopea handles vector layers and masks approximately the same as Photoshop. GIMP had its chance to clone Photoshop and has failed to do so. Even a cursory glance at Photopea immediately blows GIMP out of the water.
@@privacyvalued4134Well, I will slide into the water with the scorching heat we have here in SE Asia. I would say, everyone happy. You with your Photoshop, me with Gimp, because it does about everything I want to do. For my vector graphics Inkscape is fine and to assemble everything together Scribus works for me. I more or less worked like that from within the 90s and am a long time pensionado already, so I leave it up to you to consider me "outdated".
Canva has acquired Affinity. Which means another one-time purchase bundle about to go software subscription (SaaS) in the future. Probably not today, but never say never. I'm sticking to Corel for ease of use + lifetime ownership + no frequent updates pestering me. Just a solid, utilitarian suite.
Photopea is awesome, for me I can set canvas size and create pictures for low res Oled displays in an instant and I am sure I could do this in all the other stuff too !! But I just like it and now with your seal of approval I like it even more because I know you use this software in the wild...cheers.
Great episode! However, I think we can analyze this in two ways: 1) Alternatives to do similar work as Pshop.; 2) Alternatives to Pshop. but being able to use already created files in the application. I think that are two related things, but different. Of course, someone would like to be able to use already edited work in a new alternative, but that's the catch: staying in that proprietary format and ecosystem or not. If you can sacrifice a part of the already made work, there are more alternatives. If you can't... Well, as we saw, not many. Very interesting and is a real problem when you have experience and known workflow, to migrate. I have a similar dilemma right now with C.Draw... And I'm using an old version for now. (product names edited to avoid YT automated censorship).
Why do so many people here not appreciate that PSD files are an industry standard used in pipelines and by applications way beyond image editing? For example, video compositing applications (like After Effects and Autograph), and 3D graphics applications, import and rely on elements created in PSD format? So it's not just about being able to use existing assets, but also being about to create assets in a pipeline of other applications.
@@ExplainingComputers This is a good point especially when one has to collaborate with someone else in a workflow. Unfortunately most players in related industry aren't learning this lesson namely that it is dangerous to standardise on a proprietary format. Partly it's economics: the largest player's format(s) will get the biggest market share etc. Yes I agree in specific cases you can find an alternative format that works between specific apps but even beyond image editing we tend to be locked to proprietary industry standards.
@@rupertthecatandfamily I don't find Photoshop especially intuitive, and as to looks... that's just superficial. At least I don't have to sell one of my kidneys to get GIMP.
Many years ago I worked at a TV station in Telecine. When tweeking the colour and exposure of a film we did it mostly by looking at the waveform on the CRO. So, make the blacks black and the whites white (easy to do by waveform once you know what to look for) and you were 90% done as it did not depend upon the colour accuracy of the monitor. A final look at the image for any additional tweeks. Run the film for a few seconds to be sure then cue it up for transmission. The same applies for any still images we needed for transmission. I still use the 'make the blacks black and the whites white' technique in PhotoShop.
I'm not heavy graphic design user, but it's fun how Photopea looks more closer to Photoshop than Photoshop itself. The thing that made me prefer Photopea is that it can work offline, although I think that browser based apps can be less performant than native desktop apps. Thanks Chris!
Thank you SO much for this video! I've been using PS since version 3 and have really wanted something portable, YOU have done it :) I always love your videos and can't wait to see whats next.
Pro tip for Photopea: You can also upload custom fonts 😉 If you used Photoshop to create a psd which includes a non-system font, the font won't be correct if you open the psd in Photopea. Just import your custom font and you are good to go ☺️ The fonts are usually a problem, same as with a Powerpoint presentation on a different laptop which doesn't have the used fonts installed. Make sure you have your fonts at hand 🙂
Pro tip: Use PDFs for presentations, not Powerpoint. You can embed the fonts and PDFs are readable on pretty much anything. The only features that Powerpoint has that PDFs don't are music embeds and transitions for elements on a single slide which are largely unpopular or unnecessary.
An invaluable video. I love to see a company like Photopea out do Adobe. The day can't come soon enough where Adobe is no longer the king of the hill. This video took a lot of work and I appreciate it Chris. Thank you soo much.
I've finally switched over to gimp instead of the student copy of Photoshop cs6... One thing I wish it had was some sort of AI tools for selecting objects to move to a new layer... And like an AI stamp tool to remove it from the layer. Like I can do this stuff by hand... But it does kinda start to cause a tension to form in my throat and chest... (This originally happened when trying to get stuff to snap when building settlements and the vault 80 something....)
This is one of the most useful video in months on RU-vid! Photopea is impressive. And I love your British humour (worst AI websites 😅). Canva has bought Affinity and I am wondering if these offline products will becime subscriptions...
It's coincidental this video has been down loaded at the exact time that I have been looking for a Photoshop stand alone or web based alternative without the premium graft Adobe charges. I remember having to fork out $400+ for lifetime licence in the early 2000's for a photo editor program that was really feature rich, however it really sucked up a lot of hardware and memory resources at a time when computer hardware were nowhere near as powerful as they are today. I somehow misplaced original CD and license key, it wasn't Photoshop, it definitely was on par with it if not superior. In the past decade and a half I've basically been using freeware or trial versions to do my photo editing with say-so success. This EC video has saved me wasting a lot of time searching with Photopea being the alternative that I've been looking for. Cheers Chris 👍
My kind of video, this, Chris. Thank you. I use Pixlr for my thumbnails and my go-to for text in Shotcut who sadly can't do things like drop-shadow. Pixlr is so simple but I feel like giving PhotoPea a go. So will look forward to doing my next thumbnail with it. Also, looking forward to the video on GIMP 3.0 video.
@@ExplainingComputers Hello, Chris, well, I did it. My latest motovlog video of me simply driving around Eastbourne - #1806 - begins with the thumbnail - that was made with PhotoPea - before it dissolves into the video, proper. I tried pretty dismally to convert a PNG into a bitmap vector to iron out those pixels when stretched. Calling the Properties, or the Inspector, Blending Options didn't help but I think I'm over the worst now. I'll keep trying with PhotoPea for now.
I'm not even surprised that a non-Adobe Photoshop alternative managed to out-Photoshop actual Adobe Online Photoshop. I'd never heard of Photopea, but I'll definitely be using it when/if I actually make it to the "learn to do basic image editing" item on 2024's todo list. I really like that it's fully PSD compatible and supports advanced features, so it can grow with me. A friend of mine is trained on Adobe Cloud products for work, but can't get a home license for personal projects. I'm going to send them PhotoPea to check out. Spectacular video. :)
Photopea being a pure JS application can probably be downloaded to the local computer and run locally without having to visit a website. Looking at the very short HTML source code and the number of network requests being made (only a handful), it looks completely isolated and wouldn't be too hard to strip out the ad and cookie handling requests (i.e. remove the ads and cookie trackers) so that it makes zero external network requests and works completely offline. I just did a quick surface test of Photopea and it immediately blows away GIMP. GIMP continues year after year to fail to clone Photoshop. GIMP *still* can't do vector layers and masks, which Photopea handles like a champ.
What I'm trying to say here is that all of the components required for Photopea could probably be placed onto a USB thumbdrive and run from there without any network connection whatsoever. If someone's feeling cheeky, it could even be wrapped up in an Electron app layer to make it look and feel like a regular desktop app.
GIMP is difficult to follow if you are used to the easy UI and UX of paid creative apps. A common man would waste more time Googling the right menus and buttons whereas Pixlr is a no-brainer for those who used PS. Kudos to The Document Foundation for recognising this problem with Free Open-source Software and offering a first-launch intro explaining UI and giving users choices to match what they were accustomed to previously. LibreOffice is truly a competitor to Office.
It you are used to working (professionally) in Photoshop, Photopea offers a much better and much faster significant experience. I've no idea why you choose to dismiss it as a child's toy, which it clearly is not.
I just started using Photopea a few weeks ago, and I can say without a doubt, it is the best alternative to Photoshop I have ever used! It puts GIMP to shame, and there's no learning curve in Photopea, unlike when jumping from Photoshop to GIMP.
I like PhotoPea. One of it's killer features for me is the "Magic replacement tool" that is great for removing people and artifacts in life photos. Also I like the user plug-ins and although it doesn't support PS plug-ins, its library is increasing with the amazing effects.
Thank you Chris for a brilliant Sunday afternoon video my day is now complete. I’ve watched the video twice & taken notes which I’ll use at the photo group on Tuesday evening. For me Photopea definitely gets my vote as it's got every thing I need & you can use it on Linux 😄 It’ll save me having to dual boot into windows every time I need to edit photos plus not having to use GIMP (hair pulling time). Regards Alan :)
Photopea looks pretty impressive. The similarity of the UI to Photoshop is a big plus, as is the ability to provide basic edits on RAW files. While it opens some of my .xcf files without incident, some don't open properly (running Photopea in Firefox, might work better with a Chromium-based browser), so switching back and forth from GIMP might not work so well. One hopes that going forward, Photopea retains the ability to use the app without an account or subscription.
1:31 The free Pixlr doesn't seem too bad. The first thing I look for with these alternatives is the content aware fill. With Pixlr it's the Band-Aid tool (2nd row 4th icon). I just tried an image that even Photoshop content aware fill has trouble with and it did a little better. It's actually even a tad better than photoshop on simple clean backgrounds but the more complex the background they are all about the same. I know Gimp has Heal or Resynthesizer as the alternatives to Content aware fill, I haven't tried those yet. They are plugins though not built natively into Gimp.
The irony of Adobe's own software not 100% supporting its own file format brilliant 😂, A cynic would say they deliberately did it to push people to a full subscription.
Creative cloud stated the subscription model but has also fuelled sites like photopea, so may end up being an own goal. For non commercial use it’s expensive, like office.
My needs in image editing are pretty minimal, straightening a photo, contrast and saturation, cropping and that's about it. So these bells and whistles programs are just too much. I use pix; used to use picassa with wine but it developed some sort of binary dementia so out it went.
Perhaps we sit on the tipping point of transferring the training toll from the person to the system, app agnostic. Graphic editing is an instance. For the majority of users, app functionality is a commodity. Also, Photopea has a time based restriction on tool using. For instance, non-paying users wait 2 hours for reusing 'background removal'.
Interesting. For me all I want is the tools. The automated/AI stuff (like automated background removal) is nice, but never delivers the quality of a manual edit. So if you have to manually clean up the output anyway (which you do) for a professional job, you might as well not waste the time and just do it manually first.
@@ExplainingComputers Yes, to my surprise, I've observed many capable, technical people resisting the use of AI in various forms. However, there's no turning back now. I've been a paying subscriber of ChatGPT since day one, even though I am an engineer with a 30-year career. Many colleagues tend to underestimate its value for some reason. But you see, if it can be described, machines will inevitably do it better. This even applies to tricky tasks like background removal when the subject has a lot of hair, which has always been a nightmare. Perhaps you might be interested in a recent interview with Mr. Huang, where he predicts the end of traditional software in the not-so-distant future. We are indeed living in incredible times.
Informative as usual. I had thought that GIMP was clearly the best alternative to PhotoShop. You amazed me to find one non-Adobe photo editor that can handle PSD files. Canva is something I use only for posters and flyers - which it's quite good at. I didn't think its image editing capabilities were on a par with the others. Never heard of Pixelr or PhotoPea. I have now. 👍
Nice introduction. If I am not wrong, Pixlr offers a web app for Chromium based browsers. I also have this list of web apps I can use for low performance laptops though it is becoming exceedingly rare, even my old i5-3317U can handle GIMP and stuff. I tried a N100 laptop, can be kinda slow from single core performance (despite being skylake), it does such apps reasonably well too.
Canva could be interesting in the future as they have controversially purchased Serif and its Affinity range. How much Affinity code will be integrated into Canva and vice versa is anyone's guess right now.
I've done a couple of such episodes in the past -- ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-TXr6IBK2ElA.html and ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IQ7Ly-9sX4k.html But I may well revisit soon, not least as GIMP 3.0 will be with us soon.
Thanks Chris for another outstanding review. I have allot of my parents photos that I need to be retouched so I can send my nephews. This looks like the acceptable alternative to the $$$ Adobe Photoshop program when Gimp can handle the load. Have a great week! BTW! Nice drawing, from a stick-figure school graduate….😂!
Unless you are a serious photographer or pro image manipulator, PSD is not the be all and end all of image file formats and Gimp, for example, uses a perfectly servicable alternative file format. As for importing existing PSD files into Gimp, just a little work on them will restore the the missing elements using Gimps own tools and the image can be resaved using Gimps file format. This, again, is a small price to pay for saving £260 a year. Of course, Gimp might make PSD files 100% compatible in the coming versions so we do not need to worry about this anyway.
Not true if you make videos, do 3D graphics, or do print work. PSD is a standard format that lots of non-image-editing applications (eg video compositors) import and work with -- so it is absolutely not just an image editing issue. Text handling in GIMP is dire. And as I explicitly demonstrated in the video, GIMP does NOT introduce PSD compatibility in version 3.0! :) Oh, and the comparison is not GIMP for free vs the Adobe subscription, as Photopea is either free (with advertising) or c.$5/month. :)
I think it's bad that Adobe haven't released Photoshop and their other software for Linux. As I use it almost daily, together with some 3D rendering software, I can't switch to Linux on my main computer. My servers and laptops are running Linux though.
I primarily use GIMP for photo editing "Bring out the GIMP" but it lacks a function which Adobe Photoshop has and is enormously useful: Curves. Open the curves function and move the slider dot on the right to where the curves are in the rectangle, then do the same on the left and TA-DA! Photo comes alive. I do wish GIMP had this function!
Huh... I didn't know until the 17:00 mark there was a new version of Photoshop. It could be that the new version doesn't have Curves. I use my 15 year old version in my Windows 7 Pro PC.
Thank you. I have sent links to my 2 Granddaughters and will try this out (I can't stand the UI and usability mess of GIMP !) FYI, I used to have both Photoshop and Corel because of client requirements. I could always do whatever was needed faster, easier with less clicks in Corel than Photoshop, including Apple's show demonstrators.
I have mainly just used canva for social media posts and never thought of it as a photoshop replacement, but interesting it could somewhat handle a photoshop file.
Very interesting episode Chris. As a long time user of Photoshop 7 for photographic work, when I needed a 64 bit program to cooperate with the latest version of Neat Image I bought the very reasonably priced program Photoline, which is an excellent Photoshop replacement. It will handle psd files but I've never tried it with multiple layer files. In it you can create actions, similar to Photoshop, which is a most important feature as far as I'm concerned. Edit. Just tried it with a 5 layer file and no problems at all. Btw, Photoline runs perfectly in Wine on Linux.
I will take a look at Photoline. But as you note, it always depends on the use case. For some of us, Photoline needs to to a lot more than handle layers -- it also needs to handle text, vectors, masks and all Photoshop layer effects. As this video shows, every package can handle layers, only two here can do so correctly. As far as I can see from a quick check, Photoline has good PSD import, but not export, so cannot be use in a pipeline that requires Photoshop (eg in video editing, video compositing or 3D graphics).
I find that I can now manage a pro photography work flow with Raw Therapee and Gimp. Raw therapy is a really good alternative to Adobe camera raw and Gimp is very quickly Cathing up with Photoshop.
