🖌️ Online Photo Editor (with Layers & PSD)

Last batch from that list, and it's the one for people who actually paint. New brushes: a hard-edged pencil (down to single pixels), dodge and burn, a sponge, blur, sharpen and smudge — they all respect selections, masks and Lock transparent pixels, and B, O and R cycle them like in Photoshop. If you draw with a pen, pressure can now drive size and opacity (a mouse or a finger is never affected). There's a History panel that names every step — Brush, Gaussian blur, Canvas size — so you can click back to any of them. The colour swatch opens a proper panel with HEX, RGB, HSL, swatches and your recent colours. And on a phone, the panels finally live in a bottom sheet you drag, a long press opens a menu with the usual suspects, and two fingers can turn the view so you can paint at a comfortable angle. A grid with snapping came along too (⌘/Ctrl+'); draggable guides didn't make it this time.

Fourth batch from that list: the stuff you put ON a picture. Text now does italic, left/center/right alignment, line height, letter spacing, a quick outline and a shadow — and when you click a text layer later, every one of those comes back. You can use a font file of your own (it stays in your browser, kept with the autosaved draft), or, in Chrome and Edge, the fonts already installed on your computer; I still don't load anything from Google Fonts. The shape tool learned rounded rectangles, polygons, stars, lines and arrows (Shift for squares, circles and 45° lines). There's a sticker picker with a few hundred Twemoji and Fluent emoji, served from this site. And for the layer nerds: clipping masks (Alt-click a layer, like Photoshop), Lock transparent pixels, Lock all, plus color overlay, gradient overlay and inner shadow styles — all of which open and save in PSD.

Third gap from that comparison, and the one I bumped into most: selections and the clipboard. ⌘/Ctrl+C, X and V now do what your fingers expect — copy the selection (or ⌘/Ctrl+Shift+C for everything you see), cut it, and paste it back as a new layer in the same spot. It goes to your real clipboard as a PNG where the browser lets it; where it doesn't (Safari can be fussy), the editor keeps its own copy and says so. There's a new Select tab with Select subject (the background remover's AI, turned into a selection), Expand, Contract, Smooth, Border and Stroke, and ⌘/Ctrl-clicking a layer's thumbnail selects its pixels. Press W, then Shift+W, for a quick-selection brush that spreads until it hits an edge. And there's content-aware fill (Shift+Delete) for the sign or the stranger you want gone — honest warning: it's great on small things and smudgy on big holes, and it tells you when you've asked for a big one.

Second gap from that comparison: everything around the edges of the picture. Image now has Canvas size (grow or shrink around any of nine anchors, with the new area left transparent or filled with a color you pick), Trim (cut away transparent edges, or edges that match the top-left pixel) and rotate by any angle, where the canvas grows to fit. The crop tool learned ratios — 1:1, 4:5, 3:2, 16:9, 9:16, your own — and a straighten slider that turns the photo under the crop box and keeps the box clear of empty corners. Export… saves WebP, BMP and multi-size ICO icons as well, at 25 % to 200 % or an exact width, and tells you the real file size before you download. AVIF shows up when your browser can actually write it (Chrome can't, so I say so instead of handing you a PNG with the wrong name). And you can now open SVG files.

I lined this editor up against the open-source ones people actually use, and the first gap was obvious: no filters, and only four kinds of adjustment. So the Adjust panel has two new tabs. Filters has sharpen (unsharp mask), Gaussian blur, add noise, reduce noise, sepia, vignette, posterize, threshold, emboss, find edges and mosaic, plus eight one-click looks I named myself. Color has exposure, vibrance, color balance, black & white, photo filter and gradient map, and each one can also go in as an adjustment layer that opens and saves in a PSD. Levels got Auto contrast and Auto levels too. Everything previews live, stays inside your selection (soft edges included), and big photos are filtered in a background thread, so a 12-megapixel sharpen no longer locks up the page.

The first version did layers and PSDs, and the very first thing I reached for when I used it myself was a mask. So masks are in — paint them black and white, Shift-click to switch one off, and they survive a round trip through Photoshop. Then I kept going: a background remover that hides instead of deletes, lasso and magic wand, curves and levels, adjustment layers, drop shadows and strokes, a clone stamp and a healing brush, and Photoshop's own keyboard shortcuts (press ? to see them all). It also autosaves to your browser now, because I lost an edit to a closed tab and decided once was enough.