October 21, 2018

Photopea 3.8 – Live Shapes and new filters!

New release of Photopea is here! It has 64 545 lines of code. Play with it at the main site.

New features

  • Live Shapes
  • New Distortion filters
  • Difference Clouds filter
  • Patch Tool 30x faster
  • Rename a document by double-clicking the Tab
  • Thousands of new fonts
  • Many bugs fixed

Live Shapes

PSD files can store vector graphics, either as Vector Masks, or Shape Layers (more info here). These shapes are stored as Bézier curves. We can move Bézier knots, or transform the curves using a Free Transform, but there is no way to make a Rounded Rectangle 2x wider, while preserving the corner radius.

The PSD format lets us store the Vector Origination Data. These data contain the shape parameters (Type: Rectangle, Ellipse, Line... Width, Height, Corner Radius, etc.). Starting today, Photopea lets you edit these Origination data, and re-generate the vector shape according to them. These data can be edited in the Properties panel, under Live Shapes.

All new Ellipses and Rectangles become Live Shapes. Also, when you open a Sketch file, Photopea converts appropriate shapes into Live shapes. Note, that if you move a knot of a live shape, or rotate it a bit, the origination data are lost, and it becomes just a regular shape.

Distortion Filters

We added several new PSD filters. They all can be used as Smart Filters on Smart Objects. You can also edit corresponding Smart filters in existing PSD files.

Distortion filters let us bend the image in an irregular way. They are similar to the Liquify filter, but instead of "bending" an image by hand, it is bent automatically according to some parameters (Pinch, Ripple, Shear, Spherize, Twirl).

The Displace filter can bend an image according to a map (another image). You have to choose a size and a direction of the displacement. A bright place in the map will cause a large displacement (of the corresponding spot in the image), while a dark place will move the image just a little.

The video below shows how it works in Adobe Photoshop. In Photopea, you don't choose the map as an external file, but you choose it from existing Smart Objects of the current document.