Photopea 5.6 – Advanced Color Depth

A new release of Photopea is here! It has 138 541 lines of code. Play with it at the main site.

New features

• 16 and 32-bit color support (GPU accelerated)
• Improving the PWA
• Advanced Text Styling
• Support for "PSD inside TIFF"
• Support for JPEG XL and HEIC
• Several bugs fixed

Advanced color depth

Photopea has always supported 8-bit colors. We can have 256 different values of red, green and blue. This lets us have up to 16,777,216 different colors in our images! All combinations between #000000 and #ffffff.

Starting today, you can use 16-bit or 32-bit colors in Photopea. With 16 bits, you can have 65,536 different values of red, green and blue, 281,474,976,710,656 different colors in total. Although, there are no devices (monitors or printers) capable of reproducing so many colors, it gives us a lot of flexibility while editing.

Let's think about a gradient between #000000 (black) and #020000 (almost black). With 8 bits, there is just one color in between (#010000). But with 16 bits, there are hundreds of colors in between. If we make the image 100x brighter, we will see only three different colors in a 8-bit mode, but many more colors in a 16-bit mode. Try it yourself!

• 8-bit version (enable the adj. layer)
• 16-bit version (enable the adj. layer)

To sum it up, now, Photopea can:

• Open 16-bit and 32-bit PSD files, save them back
• Create 16-bit and 32-bit documents (File - New)
• Open 16-bit PNG files
• Open 16-bit TIFF files
• Open RAW photos as 16-bit documents