The creator Ivan is on HN as well, stating that he made almost $1 million in a year with this site. Very inspiring. And of course PhotoPea itself is fantastic, essential for every digital designer.
If he adds support for AI quick sketching (using LCMs), he can leapfrog Photoshop. Other companies have raised $50M for this, but he can absolutely bootstrap it. Especially if webgpu enables it.
It's a free alternative to a relatively expensive and clunky-to-install tool. It's popular, the first result when searching "online photoshop". And it has ads.
With a non-technical demographic, ad-blocker percentage is lower and you can make a lot of revenue.
So why can I not copy an Adobe Photoshop CD then? Do I have to delete some code on it first?
Why are people constantly sued for the likeness of logos? Colours? Text?
Why are open source, from scratch, video games sources of open ended lengths of litigation? But what if they changed the polygon count on all assets? Still free?
Changing the polygons wouldn’t be enough. You would need to change architecture, textures, colors, story lines, game play and any number of things that define a unique work. People work hard to build brands. If they are successful they have the money to defend them from more vectors than most can anticipate.
Everything is a moving window … Many of these questions are answered by big legal cases with lots of money behind them … Or one person that tries it, and test the reasoning against market and law. Such person will incur much risk for potential big reward. You may be interested in reading on Overton’s window. Always be aware of consequences to this type of “efficient” thinking and your intentions for doing so. If you stay within the window the legal cases to date have defined as acceptable you may be ok.
Before attempting such a heist you need to understand many moving pieces of business, law, art, and philosophy. The amount of work it takes to get away with stealing a good idea is far more than creating a new good idea. Often the spoils of “cheating” are short lived. Use your imagination for good and the rewards are long lived.
Isn't there a lot of value between possible and good in terms of productivity or appeal when picking any tools though? There are plenty of tools I do use that are open source and free, but for a fair price and suitable value proposition, I'm going to pick something that I'll get the investment return from regardless of whether it's open source or not
I always thought that too, and the official capitalization appears to be Potopea everywhere. But it has a performance test tool called PeaMark, which has me questioning my assumption.
PhotoPea is also one of the few graphic editors that has a competitive offering to photoshops fantastic mesh warp deformation tool. And this is comparing to affinity, pixelmator, etc.
I personally don't use it because I'm leery of using any major productivity application that runs entirely in the browser that could be pulled or go down at any time leaving me totally stranded.
It’s cool as is, but I think it’s one case of a web app that’d genuinely benefit from having an Electron app that can do things like use the global menubar on macOS and have more robust filesystem access.
It's a near clone of Photoshop - the icons, the layout, everything. It's almost exactly the same as CS2 in places. Most other photo editors have similar functions but not the exact same interface.
I don't think copying assets has to do with it. Otherwise the copyright case wouldn't focus on "look and feel". In Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., Tetris Holding won a "look and feel" copyright case over Xio Interactive's clone of Tetris called Mino [1]:
> The case was assigned to Judge Freda L. Wolfson. In defending the copyright claim, Xio founder Desiree Golden admitted to having copied Mino directly from the official Tetris app that was developed under license by Electronic Arts. Golden also admitted that they had sought a license to Tetris from Tetris Holdings, who turned them down. Subsequently, Golden continued to develop Mino based on their understanding of video game case law, and believed that they could avoid infringing on Tetris's expression by creating new audio and video assets.[13]
The case did not lead to many frivolous "look and feel" lawsuits. On the other hand, I personally believe that the judge gave copyright protection to elements that affect functional gameplay and therefore should be free to copy. (The height of the game board makes the game harder/easier, the length of the gameboard completely changes the math of creating clean stacks, the block shadow makes the game easier, the fact that the block's color changes when it gets locked in makes distinguishing between the active block and the inactive ones easier, and the inclusion of some display of N next pieces makes the game easier. The information that a player is and isn't allowed to see is part of the rules of the game, right?)
That case was not a "look and feel" case. Mino literally just copied all of the artwork from Tetris. As the artwork was a fundamental part of the game, the judge found that in this very exceptional situation, copyright was violated.
However, strict limitations apply to copyrighting functional content, like UI icons, and it is extremely unlikely that Adobe would succeed in suing PhotoPea. The icons are incidental to the functionality of the program. Indeed, the most likely outcome would be for the judge to sanction Adobe's lawyers for filing a frivolous lawsuit.
It was a look and feel case. The "look" was the appearance of the blocks and of the game board, and the "feel" was the way the blocks moved.
> Mino literally just copied all of the artwork from Tetris. As the artwork was a fundamental part of the game, the judge found that in this very exceptional situation, copyright was violated.
"artwork" is too imprecise in this case. Xio Interactive made their own assets while looking at Tetris, and the judge found that the appearances of the blocks were too similar and that the board dimensions were identical. Regarding the manner of copying [1]:
> While there might not have actually been "literal copying" inasmuch as Xio did not copy the source code and exact images from Tetris, Xio does not dispute that it copied almost all of visual look of Tetris.
> Similar bright colors are used in each program, the pieces are composed of individually delineated bricks, each brick is given an interior border to suggest texture, and shading and gradation of color are used in substantially similar ways to suggest light is being cast onto the pieces.
Indeed, Mino should've had different colors. I agree that Mino didn't need shading to suggest 3D lighting (same what), but the mentions of interior border and texture were terrible reasoning because the Tetris blocks appear flat or slightly convex while the Mino blocks appear prominently concave [2] (different how; i.e. different expression of the similar existence of lighting) in a way that nudges my trypophobia. Meanwhile, the merger doctrine [3] should have applied to the "individually delineated" aspect of the blocks.
Xio Interactive lost the case, as they should've. The colors between identical pieces, the perceptual lightness of those colors, and the colors of the background and GUI are things Xio could've changed without affecting the gameplay. I don't know whether Xio copied the positions of the different GUI elements, but Xio should have switched GUI objects from the top to the bottom or in between, or from the left to the right.
Everything below this line is bonus. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I take issue with most of the other things the judge points out while examining "look and feel". Regarding the board dimensions [1]:
> it is not a rule to have the playfield be exactly 20 units by 10 units
Yes it is. I did mention the difficulty of having a shorter board in my previous comment, though what I should've focused on was the combination of board height and gravity. Gravity is a rule, and higher gravity can be easier or harder for the player to deal with depending on the board dimensions. Additionally, changing the horizontal width alters the math [B1] of the stacking even apart from the gravity and affects the mental and time efficiency of moving the pieces to the desired horizontal positions [B2]). The size of a tennis court is a rule. You can play on different court sizes, but tennis tournaments choose specific court dimensions to the centimeter [B3]. The size of a chessboard is a rule. The size of a bowling lane is a rule. If it affects gameplay, it's a rule. (Even deliberately poor contrast can be a rule as in horror games with low lighting in dark environments, though there is no shortage of color combinations and GUI layouts with high contrast.)
> Similarly, Mino also displays "garbage" lines, "ghost" pieces, and a preview of the next piece to fall in order to enhance game play as does Tetris.
Garbage lines are a rule and sometimes a game mode. Of course, Xio Interactive did not need to include no more than and all of the exact game modes that the Tetris game had (which may or may not have happened). Choosing which game modes to include or exclude can be copyrighted expression, but I don't think copyright should protect the game modes themselves, since the design of each game mode affects the gameplay. The ghost piece makes the game much easier for low-skill players, and the next piece preview affects players of all skill levels. The judge calls it "enhanc[ing] gameplay", but the information that a player is and is not allowed to use in a game is a rule! The more pieces you see ahead, the more proactively you can ensure a clean stack. As I'm writing this, I'm realizing that applying a general "feel" test to games can lead a judge to dubious exceptions to the idea–expression distinction. An illustrative excerpt [1]:
> Again, there are almost unlimited options for expressing the pieces' movement and rotation
For movement, that's utterly wrong. For rotation, less so. The merger doctrine applies to the directions of piece movement, and movement speed is a rule. The faster the game lets the player move a piece left/right, the easier the game. (Additionally, the piece's visual position should match the actual position. Having the piece lag behind or pull ahead of where it really is would mess with players' reaction times.) Rotation affects gameplay as well. Instant rotation has been a thing since at least as early as Tetris on the NES. Making non-instant rotation purely a visual effect built on instant rotation in the code might not affect high-skill players, but will affect low-skill players. Meanwhile, the code implementation of rotation affects gameplay for everyone. Without wall kicks [B4], rotation states fall under the merger doctrine. With wall kicks, the things that a player can and cannot do change dramatically. Most of the "feel" of a Tetris-like game comes from the functionality accessible to the player. You can or cannot move the pieces up. You can or cannot rotate a piece near or inside a given formation. You can or cannot move the piece faster by holding a direction button than repeatedly tapping the direction button. You have 0 seconds, N seconds, or M movements left to continue moving the piece after the piece touches ground.
I'm not sure when he developed it, but it seems like I've been using it for the past decade for tasks where default editors like Paint suck, yet Photoshop seems too expensive.
Definitely wouldn't call it "Photopea for video", but it's free (though not FOSS) and multiplatform: DaVinci Resolve is a free NLE desktop program available on Windows, Mac and Linux. Exports are limited to 3840x2160 60fps on the free version, but that's good enough for most use cases.
Aside from increased resolution and framerate, the main differences with $300 Studio version is that it allows you to use multi-GPU setups, advanced noise reduction, lens correction, better color grading capabilities, scripting and automation with Python and LUA, along with some other things.
So Studio is definitely nice to have if you're doing professional editing, but the free version is good enough for many hobbyists.
Unlike Photopea, I don't think Resolve has any compatibility with Adobe products' files (such as Premiere Pro, After Effects, etc.)
I've tried other free tools, and Resolve definitely seems to be the most powerful. However, it's almost certainly not the easiest to use. If you're just wanting to trim video clips, combine different clips into one video, crop and add some background music or VO, etc., there's probably easier free tools to use out there.
Personally want “photopea for audio”. Basically Audacity on the web as sleek as Photopea, for the times when I just want to trim some audio and do other basic edits.
