Editing Browser Photo Editors

Hello, Hello, Hello! This post is all about browser photo editors, why they are popular, and see how they actually are! As always: please like, comment, follow! Thanks 😉

Why use a Browser Editor?

The simple answer, is that they don’t take up space and also, web apps are opening up more options for developers. So, the big part of this increase in popularity has to do web apps.

Web Apps are not new. In fact, they have been around since 1999 (possibly even before)! Things have changed since then, and they aren’t exactly the same. 2005 is the big year for web apps with the introduction of Ajax. This would change design, responsiveness, and synchronization for “web apps”. Fast-forward to 2015, Alex Russel and Frances Berrman introduce the next step for the web app. This would be the PWA (progressive web application) and would be similar to the web apps that we have today. It is also believed that Steve Jobs may have unofficially introduced the WA (web app) concept back in 2007, with the release of the Iphone, but as I have shown you, there were other types of web apps prior to this (just built differently). Although I still can’t find a complete history of the web app, this is where the origins came from and some of where today’s web apps came from.

More recently, web apps have become wildly popular. A lot of well known sites like YouTube, twitter, and Pinterest have all come out with web apps. These web apps show up on your PC home screen just like this once you download:

How do you download a web app? In the below screenshot, I am on Twitter. As you can see, on the far right there is a QR code icon and another Icon to open in the web app.

If you don’t have the web app yet, you should see this download button:

This example is in the chrome browser. I checked some other browsers too. Opera doesn’t have support for web apps yet. Here is how to do it in the Chromium version of Edge.

Photopea:

For the first photo editor, I wanted to take a look at photopea. As you can see in the top right corner, I can install the web app. If I don’t want to, I can still use this editor in the browser.

I have the photo editor installed and here is the installed editor. Now, you can see that the top bar has my plugins (the jigsaw icon) and also other browser options if I click on the three dots. Just a quick note, there are ads in the software as you can see in the screenshot below, I just normally cover them up in screenshots.

Before I started editing, I logged in although, I do not think that you need an account to edit. I have a full timelapse of this edit that you can visit by clicking here.

Here is a brief overview of what I did:

I first imported the photo and oddly enough, I couldn’t import a raw file (even though it says that raw is a supported format). I had a Jpeg of the same photo, so I just imported that. To get familiar with the UI and features, I scrolled through the menus. I did a simple brightness contrast edit too.

Next I darkened some shadows and was getting super, super frustrated with the intense UI lag. I would move my mouse and things like the slider, or in this case the graph, would trail behind my mouse! I have never used an editing software with such bad UI lag, and you know I have looked at a lot of software on this blog.

The next edit was just some increased saturation and vibrance.

Next, I brought out the greens a bit more and searched for a way to bring down the exposure on the yellow. Note, I do realize now that I could have used an exposure brush, I just didn’t think about that at the time. After that, I wanted to make the background a bit softer so went to add a median denoise and… the software crahsed. I kept on getting pop ups to close the program and I didn’t want to until I just decided that I would.

I was not able to export the photo, so I just have a screenshot below…

I am now writing this before I try out the next web editor and… I am REALLY hoping that it will be better.

Fotor:

Fotor is an editor that is found in the chrome webstore, but if you aren’t on chrome I saw, and it does work on edge! I actually had issues getting it from chrome so I actually did end up getting it from edge! Here is the editor…

I am getting strong canva vibes from this one. I already see that there are more photo edits though then canva has though. Here is the link to my timelapse:

https://kapwi.ng/c/WZIhCrWT

Here is the photo that I opened up:

After some minor edits to contrast and brightness, my photo looked like this:

I then edited the curves to get darker shadows, there wasn’t any software lag on the curves edit this time!

I also added a vignette and finished the edit with this photo:

I ended with this editor and think that it is okay, but I would probably just use canva for the same things or another simple photo editor.

Pixlr X-

Okay, so I saved the very best edit for last! If you want to check out the timelapse, I had a bit more time to edit this one, so it came out the best. I also got a cool song from Pixabay which I kinda got addicted too. 😂 Thank you John_Yasutis!

Timelapse Link: https://kapwi.ng/c/u6YtS0nW

Okay, here is a screenshot step by step of my edits!

This first screenshot has my photo (unedited) in the editor. I worked on getting familiar with the software, and began the edit.

First I started the basics, vibrance, temp, exposure, etc.

Next I adjusted the shadows and made the decision that I wanted to remove the background from the photo, kinda like I did in my post back in November 2020.

Okay, I got to work on removing the background… After a while, I got this as my photo:

I am actually really happy with this edit. The software did have some lag, photopea was a bit worse though. Overall I really liked this editor and the overall edit!

Conclusion:

As always with these posts, I like to tell you which editors I ended up uninstalling. I wanted to uninstall Photopea (because of the UI lag and the freezing) but I didn’t know how… If you need to know how, here is an article for Google and for edge users, you can literally do it through the windows home screen like any other software. I would guess that is the same for Mac users. I also uninstalled Fotor because it was so similar to canva which I already use. That brings us to the editor that I kept: Pixlr X. I had seen this editor before thinking that it was overrated but after using it I think that it is a pretty decent editor. The lasso tool is super nice, and although I can use a lasso tool gimp and photoshop elements, it is really just nice to have a simpler option.

I really hope that you liked this post! As always, a like and follow would be absolutely phenomenal! This post took a ton of time and some feedback would be awesome! Also, If you are interested, I have a post up over on Medium.com about Google Snapseed and what is happening to it as the Google Photos Editor gets more and more updates.

Have a wonderful week everyone! 💗🙂

Oh, one more thing. I am going to put a poll here to see which of these editors you would consider using.

News on PWA’s:

There was actually this article that I saw while I was writing the post. Google is changing PWA’s soon. Learn more at this link:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-is-getting-a-new-progressive-web-app-feature/

Sources:

https://www.devsaran.com/blog/history-web-application-development#:~:text=In%201999%2C%20the%20concept%20of,to%20compose%20asynchronous%20web%20apps.

https://aplextor.medium.com/a-brief-history-of-web-app-50d188f30d

https://medium.com/progressivewebapps/history-of-progressive-web-apps-4c912533a531

Okay, Goodbye!

-Digital Wonders & Smiles