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September 14, 2013

# Introduction

What is Photo Pea, why it was made, and what should it be used for.

## A little story

In September 2012, I had two courses of computer graphics behind me and had a lot of spare time. So I got an idea to make a simple web-based photo editor. I was working on it for 3 months in 2012 and 2 months during this summer, and I really enjoyed it! :) I learned many new things and realised, that it is not going to be as easy as I expected.

## Just another photo editor?

Modern photo editors (GNU Gimp, Adobe Photoshop, Zoner Photo Studio) are usually native apps, which have to be downloaded and installed on the device. It takes pretty long time to turn them on and off. It may bother you, e.g. when you just want to resize a photo. Adobe Photoshop, which is very often used by many professionals, is also quite expensive.

Because photo editors are native apps, it is hard to find any good editor for some minority operating systems. Some users may even buy some specific operating system just to be able to run the photo editor. Photo Pea should remove all these problems.

## Main features of Photo Pea

Photo Pea should be an advanced editor, so it can be used by professionals. It must have:

- Layers - to split images into several parts
- Layer masks - just generally useful
- Blend modes - specifying, how layers "combine" with each other
- Brush - there must be a way to change the color of pixels
- Selections - choosing, which pixels of layer you want to edit
- Procedural adjustments - changing brightness, hue, saturation, convolutions (blur, sharpening ...) etc.

## File formats

I wanted Photo Pea to cooperate with currently used programs and implement their formats. I decided to implement the parser for PSD and XCF.

Well, you know the goals! Follow this blog to see how am I doing :)