A free Photoshop alternative that runs in your browser

What people actually mean by "Photoshop"

Almost nobody who searches for a free alternative wants all of Photoshop. They want the part they use: cut a person out of one photo and put them in another, fix the colour on a picture that came out orange, take a wire out of the sky, put words on a picture, blur a face, and get a PNG out at the end without the layers being lost the moment they close the window. Those jobs need a small, specific set of things: layers that can be masked, selections that can be made by hand and by colour, a handful of retouching brushes, levels and curves, text that stays editable, and a project file.

Obscura Photo Editor has that set. It runs in the tab, it uploads nothing, and it works with the internet switched off once the page has loaded. This page says exactly what is in it and exactly what is not, so you can decide in a minute whether it does your job rather than finding out an hour in.

What is there

Layers. As many as you like, each with its own position, opacity and one of sixteen blend modes (multiply, screen, overlay, soft light, colour, luminosity and the rest). A layer can be a picture, a piece of text, or an adjustment. Layers can be duplicated, merged down, flattened, aligned to an edge or centred, rotated, flipped, and locked so painting cannot spill outside the pixels already there.

Masks. Any layer takes a mask. Make it from a selection, or start from one that shows everything or hides everything, then paint on it: the brush reveals, the eraser hides, and the gradient tool fades one into the other. A mask can be turned off to compare, inverted, turned back into a selection, or applied to the pixels for good.

Adjustment layers. Levels, curves, colour balance, hue and saturation, vibrance, shadows and highlights, a photo filter, a gradient map, black and white, and the rest of the twenty-one adjustments can each sit as a layer that changes everything beneath it without touching a pixel. Double-click it later and move the sliders again. Levels and curves work on the whole picture or on the red, green or blue channel on its own.

Selections. A rectangle, an ellipse, a freehand lasso, a polygon lasso, a magic wand with a tolerance, and a colour-range picker that selects every pixel near a colour you click. A selection can be feathered, grown, shrunk, smoothed, turned into a border, inverted, or loaded from a layer's pixels or its mask.

Retouching. A clone stamp, a healing brush that matches the texture and the tone, dodge and burn and sponge, smudge, and a blur brush. Selecting something and choosing Remove what is selected fills the area from its surroundings, first by spreading the colours inward and then by fitting small patches from just outside the edge. It takes out wires, marks and small things against fairly even backgrounds; it does not know what the thing was, and it does not invent anything.

Text and effects. A text layer keeps its words, font, size, weight, colour and alignment, and can be edited until you choose to rasterise it. Any layer can carry a drop shadow, an outer glow and a stroke, each with its own colour and size, and they stay editable.

Transform. Free transform with corner and edge handles, or by numbers: scale, rotate, flip. Crop to a ratio, straighten by a fraction of a degree, trim the transparent edges, resize the picture or the canvas.

Filters. Gaussian blur, motion blur, sharpen, unsharp mask, high pass, reduce noise, add noise, pixelate, vignette, emboss, find edges. Eleven, each with a live preview and a slider.

Files. It opens JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, AVIF, and HEIC from an iPhone. The project file is a zip that holds every layer as a PNG with a small text file describing the stack, so nothing about it is a secret and anything that opens a zip can get the layers out. Export gives you a flat PNG, JPEG or WebP at the size you ask for. Undo goes back through everything, and a history panel lets you jump to any earlier step.

What is not there

This is the part a comparison page usually leaves out, so it is the part to read.

• Vector shapes that stay editable. The shape tools draw pixels. There are no paths, no pen tool, and no shape layers you can reshape later.
• Camera raw. A .CR3, .NEF or .ARW file will not open. Convert to JPEG or HEIC in the camera's own software first.
• PSD files. It does not read or write them. If you need to hand layers to somebody who uses Photoshop, this is not the tool for that hand-off.
• Print. No CMYK, no colour profiles, no soft-proofing. Everything is sRGB and meant for a screen.
• Layer groups, smart objects, rulers, guides and perspective warp. Not there yet. Layers are a flat list.
• Plugins, actions and batch processing. There is no way to script it and no marketplace of things to bolt on.
• Anything that needs a server. No generative fill, no cloud library, no collaboration. The whole editor is code running in your tab, which is the reason nothing leaves it.

If your work lives in one of those bullets, use something else and do not feel bad about it. If it does not, the table below is the short version.

Why in a browser, and what that costs

The usual reason a free image editor asks you to upload is that the work is done on their computer and the upload is the price. Here the work is done on yours. Every edit is arithmetic on a canvas in the tab's memory, which is why the page keeps working with the network cable out and why there is nothing for a privacy policy to describe. The only thing ever fetched after the page loads is the HEIC decoder, about 1.4 MB, from this site, the first time a HEIC is opened, and it is kept on your device after that.

The cost is honest too. A browser gives an editor one thread and a limited amount of memory, so the editor refuses a picture over 40 megapixels and tells you to shrink it first rather than trying and falling over, and a 30-megapixel file with a dozen layers will feel slow. The desktop programs use the graphics card for most of this; a browser cannot yet do that the same way everywhere. For a photo off a phone, which is 12 megapixels, none of this is noticeable.

If you have set up a folder on the front door, everything you export or save from the editor lands in its own Photo Editor folder inside it without a download prompt, alongside the rest of your work from this site.

The smaller tools, for the smaller jobs

Most of what people open Photoshop for is a single operation, and there is no sense loading a layer stack for it. PHOTO crops, straightens and marks up a picture in a page that opens in a second. SHRINK resizes, converts and compresses a batch of images at once, which is the whole job when the job is "make these small enough to email". OPTIC reads the text out of a photograph or a scan. All three work the same way as the editor: in the tab, nothing uploaded.