Photopea is an image editor, which can work with both raster and vector graphics. You can use it for simple tasks, such as resizing images, as well as complex tasks, such as designing webpages, creating illustrations, processing photographs and more.

This course will teach you how to use Photopea step by step. We will start with basic tasks and gradually progress to more complex features. 

Starting and using Photopea

Photopea editor works in a web browser. It can be started by going to www.Photopea.com. Photopea can run on any device (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone or any other computer), but for the best comfort, we recommend having a big screen, a precise pointing device (a mouse or a stylus) and a keyboard.

Photopea runs completely in your device, just like Sketch or Photoshop do. It does not upload any of your files to the internet. You can load Photopea.com, disconnect from the internet and keep using it completely offline. None of your files ever leaves your computer.

Opening files

There are several ways of opening files. The standard way is through the Open dialog (File - Open). You can also paste images (from the system clipboard) simply by pressing Ctrl + V. Another way is to open files by dragging them from your local system and dropping them into the Photopea environment inside a web browser.

When you have no documents opened, dropped files will be opened in a regular way. When some documents are already open in Photopea, you can drop new document into the main area of the current document. The new file will be inserted into the current document as a new layer (a Smart Object layer).

When some documents are opened, you can drop new files into the top bar of the main area (which contains the list of opened documents). Then, new files will be opened separately.

There is an experimental feature, which allows you take pictures using the camera of your device right inside Photopea. Press File - Take a picture to take a picture.

WORKSPACE

The workspace of Photopea is very similar to other image editors. It consists of the Toolbar on the left, the Sidebar on the right, the Working area in the middle and the Top menu at the top.

Toolbar

The toolbar contains all available tools. You can switch tools by clicking on their icons in the toolbar. Only one tool can be active at a time. Icons with a little arrow in the corner (e.g. Lasso tool) contain the whole group of related tools. Click on them to see the menu, then choose a specific tool from that menu.

Hold your mouse over the tool icon for a moment to see the name of that tool. Some tools have capital letters attached to them (e.g. B for Brush tool). You can also switch tools by pressing corresponding keys on your keyboard.

There is the foreground and the background color at the bottom of the toolbar. It is a simple palette of two colors, which are used by some tools. You can swap them with the X button, or reset to default values (black and white) with a D button.

Sidebar

The sidebar consists of two vertical columns. Each column can be folded and unfolded by clicking the thick line at the top of the column.

These columns contain panels (Layers, History, Paragraph ...), that you may need during your work. When the column is unfolded, you can see multiple panels, that are inside. When the column is folded, you can show and hide a specific panel by clicking the corresponding button in the column.

If you don't know where a specific panel is located, press Window - name of that panel.

Main Area

Photopea allows you to open multiple documents (e.g. JPG images) at the same time. The list of opened documents is shown in the bar at the top of the main area.

Here you can switch between documents and choose the one that you want to work with. You can also close documents by pressing the cross next to the document name. Below that bar, in the middle of the workspace, is the actual content of your document. It is the active area, where you can draw, move objects etc.

Top Menu

The top menu consists of two parts the first part (File, Edit, Image ...) is the main menu of Photopea. It is always the same.

The second part (below the main menu) contains parameters of the current tool. It has a different content for each tool. For example, for the Brush tool, it contains the opacity of the brush, while for the Type tool, it contains the size of characters.

Cropping the image

Another way of changing the resolution is by cropping the image. It will preserve the resolution and the quality of the content, but it will change the "window", through which you can see the content or its part. The basic way to do it is through Image - Canvas Size.

Crop tool

The crop tool allows you to define the "viewing window" manually. Choose the Crop tool and draw a rectangle over the document. You can drag the rectangle to move it across the document, or drag the corner to change its size. You can also rotate the rectangle by dragging it near the edge, which allows you cropping the image using a different angle.

Once your cropping rectangle is ready, you can confirm or cancel the cropping in the top menu.

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Layer Manipulation

Photopea offers you many ways to manipulate layers. You can move them, rotate, bend etc.

Move Tool

The Move tool is the basic tool for moving layers and their parts. It is the first tool in the toolbar. It can be enabled temporarily by pressing Ctrl key (after releasing Ctrl, you will return to your previous tool). By default, it will move all layers, that are currently selected (in the Layers panel). Note, that it is enough to select just the folder, to move all its content.

If you select just the mask of the layer, and that mask is not linked to the main content, the Move tool will move the mask only. Similarly, you can move only the main content, without moving the mask.

When the Move tool is active, you can move object also with cursor keys ("arrows") on your keyboard. One keypress will move the content by one pixel. If you hold Shift, content will be moved in ten pixel steps.

The Move tool has the auto-select feature, which can be enabled in the top menu, or temporarily by holding Ctrl key. With auto-select enabled, you can press anywhere in the image, and Photopea will automatically detect the closest layer under your cursor, and make it selected (in the Layers panel). This way, you don't have to select layrs manually in the Layers panel, but it is enough to click on them. Of course, if some layer is completely covered by another layer, you can not select it this way.

Aligning objects

Sometimes you want to align two or more layers together (e.g. so they all have centers at the same point, or to get their upper edge to the same height). Just select multiple layers and use one of six buttons in the top menu of the Move tool, to align these layers.

Free Transform

Free Transform is the basic tool for doing transformations. It works as any other regular tool, but it is not present in the toolbar. You can enable it by clicking Edit - Free Transform, or Alt + Ctrl + T.

When you enable Free Transform, the transformation will be applied to the layers, that are currently selected, i.e. to the same layers (or their parts), which would be moved by the Move tool at that moment. As you enable it, the transformation rectangle will appear around the transformed content. It has four control points on corners, four control points on sides and the rotation center at the middle.

Press and drag inside the rectangle to move it. Press and drag outside the rectangle to rotate it. Press and drag its corners to change its size. Press and drag its sides to scale it horizontally or vertically. When the Ctrl key is down, press and drag the side to skew the content.

Besides moving the rectangle, you can set transformation parameters directly in the top menu. Following parameters are available.

• X, Y: the position of the object
• W, H: Width and Height. Add "%" or "px" for the value in percent or in pixels
• Angle: the rotation of the object (in degrees)
• Skew X, Y: the skew of the object

When the Free Transform is enabled, the environment is locked and you can not do anything else. Once you finish the transforming, confirm it or cancel it using buttons in the top menu. You can also confirm it with the Enter key, or cancel it with the Escape key.

Common transforms

When you need to do a "common" transform (such as rotating 90 degrees, or "mirror" the image left-to-right), you can do it much faster. Press Edit - Transform - ... and choose one of predefined transformations.

Perspective transform

Scaling, rotating and skewing the content may be not enough. Imagine, that you need to put your image on a flat surface, that is viewed from the side. The edge, that is near, must be longer, and the edge, that is far, must be shorter.

You can do it with the perspective transform. Just hold Ctrl key and drag corners: you will be able to move each corner separately, to achieve the 3D effect.

Warping

Perspective transform may let us do a 3D transformation of an image, but it is still not enough in some cases. Sometimes, we may want to place an image on the surface, which is not flat (a cylinder or a ball). In these cases, we would like to "bend" the image into a more interesting shape.

Warp allows us to bend the rectangular area using 16 control points. There are four control points for the location of corners, each corner has two control points for the direction of edges near that corner (8 more points) and there are four control points for the center of the image.

When the Free Transform is on, there will be a "Warp" button in the top panel. Click it to switch between a standard editing mode and a warp editing mode. There are also several predefined shapes, such as Arch or Flag, so you don't have to move points manually.

Creating Selections

There are many ways to create selections. Designers often need to select thousands or even millions of pixels. Creating the necessary selection may take a lot of time. It is very useful to learn about all the tools, to be able to create selections effectively.

The basic operation is selecting all pixels (Select - All or Ctrl + A). Another useful operation is to create a selection according to the transparency of some layer. Hold the Ctrl key and click on the thumbnail of a layer to create such selection.

  Rectangle Select, Ellipse Select

These tools allow you to create rectangular selections (or ellipse selections). Simply click and drag the mouse to create the selection.

Lasso

Lasso tool allows you to draw selections by hand. Simply click and drag the mouse around the object, that you want to select. It can be useful to zoom in, to be more precise.

Polygonal Lasso

Polygonal lasso allows you to draw a polygonal selection. Simply click on the image to add the new corner of a polygon. Press Delete to remove the last corner. Double-click (or hit Enter) to finish the selection.

Magnetic Lasso

Magnetic lasso is a smart tool for making selections. It is very similar to the standard lasso, but it "sticks" to edges of objects.

Click anywhere to add the first point, then move the mouse along the edge to draw the selection. Control points will be added along the selection. Magnetic lasso tries to find the most appropriate path from the last control point to the current position of the mouse. Press Delete to remove the last control point, or click to add the control point manually (to force Magnetic lasso to go in a specific way). Double-click (or hit Enter) to finish the selection.

Combining selections

When you create a new selection, it can either replace the old one, or it can be combined with the old one. Each selection tool has several parameters in the top menu, which define the way, how two selections are combined. There is the default replace mode (to replace the old selection), union mode (to connect two selections together), subtract mode (to remove the new selection from the old one), intersect mode (to select only pixels, that are in both selections) and XOR mode, which corresponds to the union, while subtracting the intersection.

These modes allow you to create selections in multiple steps. E.g. selecting the main area with lasso tools, then adding and subtracting small pieces to make it perfect.

Selection tools also have a feather parameter, which will apply feather right after the selection is finished. Many designers create all selections with a small blur, to avoid sharp edges between selected and unselected areas.

When any selection tool is active, you can press the mouse inside the current selection and drag it to move that selection. So e.g. if you made an elliptical selection of the correct size, but you missed its position by several pixels, just click and drag it to the new place. This is possible with the replace mode only (e.g. if you had the subtract mode, clicking and dragging inside an existing selection would draw a new ellipse, that would be removed from the current selection).

Text

Putting text into images is an essential operation of image editing. Photopea offers a rich set of tools for working with text. Text is stored in PSD documents inside Type Layers, which have a thumbnail with a capital letter T on it.

There are three kinds of Type layers:

• Point text - defined by the point of origin. The text starts at that point and continues on a single line until the line break (Enter).
• Paragraph text - defined by the rectangle. Paragraphs are broken automatically into multiple lines to fill the rectangle.
• Text on a curve - defined by a curve, letters are arranged along the curve.

Creating a Type layer

The Type tool is used for working with Type layers: .

To create a Point text, choose a Type tool and click (press and release) the mouse at some place, which will become the origin.

To create a Paragraph text, press the mouse and drag it to draw a rectangle, then release the mouse. After creating the new Type layer, you can start typing.

If you click inside a path, the rectangle will be made around that path, and the text will be constrained by a curve of that path.

To create a text on a curve, select a curve first (in Paths panel, or a shape layer / vector mask), and click on its contour.

There will be two new symbols (points) on a curve: An X symbol and an O symbol. The text is placed between them. Use the Path Select tool to move these points, or to switch text rendering to the opposite side of the curve.

Editing a Type layer

There are two important actions when editing type layers: Entering the layer and Escaping the layer. To Enter a type layer, just click on it with a Type tool (newly created layers are entered automatically). After entering the layer, the environment is locked and you can edit the layer (and nothing else). To do something else (e.g. edit another type layer), you must escape the current layer first.

To escape the type layer, you must confirm or cancel your changes using buttons in the top menu. Escaping and canceling changes is also possible with the Escape key on the keyboard.

When you have entered a type layer, many ways of editing are possible. You can select any text with a mouse, delete it, add a new text, copy and paste etc. When it is a Paragraph text, you can also change the size of the rectangle by moving its corners. You can move the mouse outside the text, press and drag it, to move the type layer.

Saving files

You can save your work as a PSD file (to preserve the whole structure of the document) using File - Save as PSD. You can also save your file for the distribution on the web (through JPG, PNG, SVG, PDF and other formats) using File - Export As - PNG, JPG etc.

The Save for Web window lets you choose the output format. You can also enter the resolution of the output image. Now, you can already use Photopea to resize images (File - Open, File - Export As - JPG, enter the new size and Save).

When a document was opened from your device, the File - Save option will not work (Photopea is just a website, and it can not rewrite files in your device). You have to use File - Save as PSD instead. But if you opened your file from Google Drive, or as a Smart Object, or from a server (using the API), File - Save will save your file to a correct destination.

1) SOFTWARE LINK : https://www.photopea.com/

2) TUTORIAL LINK : https://www.photopea.com/tuts/

3) BLOG LINK : https://blog.photopea.com/