January 12, 2021

Photopea 5.0 – open Illustrator files!

A new release of Photopea is here! It has 98 893 lines of code. Play with it at the main site.

New features

  • Support for Adobe Illustrator files
  • Support for Adobe Fireworks files
  • Faster rendering of vector graphics
  • New filters in the Filter Gallery
  • Several bugs fixed

Adobe Illustrator files (.AI)

Adobe Illustrator is a popular tool for creating vector graphics. Starting today, you can open .AI files in Photopea.

The structure of a document (paths, groups, clip groups), layer properties (opacity, blend modes) and other features are preserved. Raster images are preserved as Smart Objects. Text layers remain editable, text properties are preserved.

Vector Patterns do not have any analogy in the PSD format. For now, a shape with a vector pattern is converted into a Smart Object with a vector mask.

Gradient Meshes also do not have an analogy in the PSD format. For now, Photopea finds the brightest spot and the darkest spot in a Mesh, and draws a linear gradient between them.

Photopea is not a professional vector editor and it can not fully replace Adobe Illustrator. However, it allows you to work with .AI files in a "PSD way", or convert AI files to PSD, SVG, PDF and other formats.

Adobe Fireworks files (.PNG)

Adobe Fireworks was a popular raster and vector editor, similar to Sketch App or Adobe XD. Its development stopped in 2012. It stored the work in .PNG files. These .PNG files could be opened in regular image viewers (and you could see a regular raster image). However, these PNG files contain additional data, and if you opened them in Adobe Fireworks, you could see many kinds of layers, folders, color and gradient fills, etc.

Starting today, you can open such PNG files in Photopea (and see layers and other features), and convert them into the PSD format.

Faster rendering of vector graphics

We made the rendering of vector graphics about 2x faster. Thanks to this improvement, vector files (AI, SVG, PDF, Sketch, XD, Figma) are opened 15 to 30 % faster.