Photoshop Pea User Guide

    Workspace The workspace of Photopea is very similar to other image editors. It consists of the  Toolbar  on the left, the  Sidebar  on the right, the  Working area  in the middle and the  Top menu  at the top. Toolbar The toolbar contains all available tools. You can switch tools by clicking on their icons in the toolbar. Only one tool can be active at a time. Icons with a little arrow in the corner (e.g. Lasso tool) contain the whole group of related tools. Click and hold a tool button to see the menu with more tools in that group. Keep your mouse above a tool icon for a moment to see the name of that tool. Some tools have capital letters attached to them (e.g. B for Brush tool). You can also switch tools by pressing corresponding keys on your keyboard. There is  the foreground and the background  color at the bottom of the toolbar. It is a simple palette of two colors, which are used by some tools. You can swap them with the X button, or reset to default values (black and white)

  FILES Digital graphics is stored as a  raster  image, or a  vector  image. There are many formats for saving and distributing various types of graphics. Let's mention  PNG and JPG , which contain a single-layer rectangular raster image (a grid of pixels). Image editors use their own file formats, that contain raster and vector graphics, and additional information, which can be useful for changing the image in the future. For example, when we add a text into an image and save it as a PNG, letters would become pixels and such text would be hard to change (we would have to guess the font name, character size, the original image behind the letters would be lost). Photopea uses the PSD format as the main format for storing image documents with an additional information. It was designed for the use in Adobe Photoshop and became very popular since then. All files, that you open in Photopea (such as PNG, JPG, Sketch) are converted to PSD (when they are not PSDs already). When you finish

Navigation We already know, how to open and save files in Photopea. The next step is viewing the image and its parts comfortably and moving between different areas of the image. Zoom tool The Zoom tool allows you to zoom in and zoom out at different places of the image. Just select the tool (in the toolbar on the left) and click on the image. You can switch between zooming in and zooming out in the top panel, or by pressing the Alt key on the keyboard. You can also click and drag to the right to zoom in, or drag to the left to zoom out. There is a  quick mode  for the Zoom tool. By pressing  Ctrl + Spacebar , you will switch to the Zoom tool, which you can use in a regular way. E.g. you can add or release Alt to switch between zooming in and zooming out. After releasing the keyboard keys, you will return back to the previous tool. It is one of the fastest ways to zoom. Hand tool The Hand tool allows you to move the view to different parts of the image. Choose the Hand tool in the toolb

  Image size All (PSD) documents, even those with vector-only graphics, have a specific document size (the resolution in pixels). Higher resolution will give you a better precision, but it also makes image files larger. You can change the document resolution in several ways. Scaling the image Photopea allows you to make the resolution lower or larger and scale the content of the document according to the new resolution. You can do it by choosing  Image - Image Size  and entering a new size. You can also enter a new DPI value there. You can also rotate or flip the image using Image - Transform - Rotate etc. Cropping the image Another way of changing the resolution is by cropping the image. It will preserve the resolution and the quality of the content, but it will change the "window", through which you can see the content or its part. The basic way to do it is through  Image - Canvas Size . Crop tool The crop tool allows you to define the "viewing window" manually. C

Layers Each PSD document consists of  layers . The layer represents some part of the image. It is usually an area filled with transparent, partially transparent or opaque pixels. Layers are rendered one on top of another, to create the final image. You usually edit just one layer at a time. Changing (moving, rotating, drawing into) one layer has no effect on other layers. Layers panel Layers panel  is the main place for working with the layer structure of the document. You can find it in the sidebar on the right. It cotnains the list of all layers and their thumbnails. Layers at the bottom of the list are the layers "in the back", while layers at the top are the layers "in the front". When we have many layers, we need to choose one, wich we want to work with. A layer can be  selected  simply by clicking on it (on its name or on its thumbnail) in the Layers panel. Sometimes we need to select multiple layers at the same time. E.g. if we want to rotate all of them by t

  Masks We already know layers. They are building blocks of our document. Sometimes, we need to hide a part of the layer (so it is not shown in the result), without deleting the actual pixel data. In Photopea (and many other editors), it can be done with  masks . We can think of a layer mask as an extra image, attached to the layer. It has the same size as that layer (so each pixel of the mask has a corresponding pixel in the layer). The mask does not have colors - it can be black and white only. The black color means, that corresponding pixels of the layer are hidden, while the white color means, that corresponding pixels of the layer are shown. Precisely, masks can have many shades of gray, and produce many levels of transparency. Working with masks There are  raster masks  and  vector masks  (the difference will be explained later). Each layer can have at most one raster mask and at most one vector mask. Folders can also have masks (in that case, the mask is applied to the whole con