There is a terrible refugee crisis that goes unnoticed in media for years. Refugees are left without any help, or with some crumbs of the right stuff, just enough to survive. And no, we are not talking EU…

Exodus we are talking about happens from Windows to Linux, from centralized, blackboxed, virus prone spying platform, to an open, free and reliable system. As you know, Windows still has one great advantage: a solid sofware base developed by other centralized corporations, like Adobe, for example. Adobe has actually set industrial standard for a series of design software that do not have appropriate replacements in the Linux environment. Key applications are Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

While Illustrator can be succesfully replaced by an excellent InkScape, Photoshop and InDesign didn’t have serious contenders. GIMP was pretty powerful, but its interface was always far below the industry standards set by Photoshop. There are great hopes for the Wine Windows emulator, but as every emulator it will probably never be a true solution. What’s to be done in the case of emergency?

PhotoPea to the rescue!

Photoshop dependant Windows refugees to Linux in the Internet ocean can reach for a “life jacket” thrown by PhotoPea — an advanced image editor, which can work with both raster and vector graphics. You can use it for simple tasks, such as resizing images, as well as complex tasks, such as designing webpages, creating illustrations, processing photographs and more.

When you open initial page from the link, you will get well known Photoshop environment, albeit not as powerful as the latest version of the Adobe’s flagship program. So, what can you do?

Main features of Photo Pea

As an advanced photo editor, Photo Pea must have some essential features for professional work:

• Layers — split images into several parts
• Layer masks — generally useful in editing
• Blend modes — specifying, how layers interact with each other
• Brush — changing the color of pixels
• Selections — choosing which pixels of layer you want to edit
• Procedural adjustments — changing brightness, hue, saturation, convolutions (blur, sharpening…) etc.

So, let’s imagine you are using someone else’s computer, or you are using Linux, or you have find yourself on the road with a need to quickly edit .PSD or .XCF file, what are you going to do? You will pull up PhotoPea page with all basic tools necessary to edit your file.

Duration: 4:10

Of course, we can imagine that by some miracle, you are finding this kind of environment completely unfamiliar. In that case, you can find all the critical informations at their Introduction Blog page, and also very usefull Tutorials which will help you to do your work as quick as possible.

Best of all…

This project is free! That is, its free if you’re ready to suffer… I mean tolerate some ads. If you are not, you can go premium and buy some time free of ads if you have highly intensive work to do:

PhotoPea can even be configured using a parameter after a hash sign…

PhotoPea is a project of Czech programmer Ivan Kutskir. While it is developed from 2013, PhotoPea is still in an early development stage. Curent version is 3.8 and you can contribute its development by suggesting new features at GitHub or at email: [email protected] and help his noble goal to make the most advanced and affordable photo editor.

One more good news at the end — offline work!

PhotoPea runs completely in your device, just like Sketch or Photoshop do. It does not upload any of your files to the internet. You can load Photopea.com, disconnect from the internet and keep using it completely offline. None of your files ever leaves your computer.

Good luck, developer(s)!

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