Layers and blend modes
Build an image the way you would in a desktop editor. Stack as many layers as a
document needs, reorder them by dragging, rename them, lock them, hide them and set
opacity per layer. Sixteen blend modes — multiply, screen, overlay, soft light,
colour dodge, difference, hue, luminosity and the rest — let you composite without
touching the pixels underneath. When a stack is finished you can merge a layer down
into the one below it or flatten the whole document into a single layer.
Selections that behave like a mask
Rectangular, elliptical, free-hand lasso and magic wand selections constrain
everything that happens next. Paint, fill, delete or run a filter and the change stops
at the selection edge. A selection can be inverted, cleared, promoted to its own layer
or used to crop the canvas, so isolating a subject and editing only that area takes a
couple of clicks rather than a mask-building ritual.
Brushes, shapes and text
The tool rail covers the whole drawing workflow: a pressure-friendly brush with
adjustable size and hardness, a hard-edged pencil, an airbrush, an eraser, a paint
bucket and a gradient tool. For structured work there are line, arrow, rectangle,
ellipse, polygon and star shapes plus a text tool, and an eyedropper for sampling any
colour already on the canvas.
Retouching tools
Four retouching brushes handle the repair work that separates a snapshot from a
finished image: blur for softening a distracting background, sharpen for recovering
local detail, smudge for pushing pixels around, and a clone stamp for copying one part
of the image over another. Each one respects the active selection and the active
layer.
Photo adjustments and filters
Fifteen adjustment sliders cover tone (exposure, brightness, contrast, highlights,
shadows, gamma), colour (saturation, vibrance, temperature, tint, hue shift) and
detail (clarity, softness, grain, vignette). All of them preview live on the active
layer before you commit. On top of that sits a filter gallery with grayscale, noir,
sepia, invert, vivid, fade, warm, cool, vintage, duotone, posterize, threshold,
solarize, emboss, edge detect, pencil sketch, bloom, pixelate and vignette presets.
Canvas geometry
Resize the image or the canvas independently, with an anchor grid that decides where
the existing pixels land. Crop to a selection, trim transparent edges automatically,
rotate by 90 degrees in either direction or by 180, and flip horizontally or
vertically. Every one of these operations goes through the same unlimited undo history
as a brush stroke.
Opening and exporting files
Open a PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF or SVG by dropping it onto the window, picking it from
disk, or pasting it straight from the clipboard. Export back out as PNG, JPEG or WebP
with control over quality and output scale. Work in progress can be saved as a
.paint project file that preserves the full layer stack, so you can close
the tab and pick the document up later.
Built for keyboard-driven work
The shortcut map follows the conventions you already know from other editors — single
keys for tools, the usual modifiers for undo, redo, select all, copy and paste, space
plus drag to pan and scroll to zoom. Press ? at any time for the full list.
A dark and a light theme are both available and the choice is remembered between
visits.
Frequently asked questions
Do my images get uploaded anywhere?
No. Paint Studio has no server-side component at all. Images are decoded into an HTML
canvas inside your own browser tab and every operation runs there. Nothing is
transmitted, stored remotely or shared with a third party, which makes the editor safe
for photographs, screenshots and documents you would not want to hand to an online
service.
Is it free?
Yes, completely, with no account, no trial period, no watermark on exports and no
feature held back behind a paywall. The project is open source and released under the
MIT licence.
Does it work offline?
After the first visit, yes. A service worker caches the application shell, so the editor
keeps loading without a connection and can be installed to your home screen or dock as a
progressive web app.
Does it work on a phone or tablet?
The interface adapts to small screens and the canvas responds to touch and stylus input.
A tablet with a pen is a genuinely comfortable way to draw; a phone is better suited to
quick crops, adjustments and filters than to detailed retouching.
How large an image can it handle?
Documents up to 8000 × 8000 pixels can be created directly. The practical ceiling
depends on how much memory your browser will give the tab, since every layer is a full
canvas buffer — a handful of layers at print resolution is fine on a normal laptop.
Can I use it instead of Photoshop or GIMP?
For layered compositing, retouching, colour correction, cropping and export, it covers
the same ground. What it deliberately does not do is CMYK output, colour management,
RAW development or scripting, so it complements a desktop suite for quick work rather
than replacing one in a print production pipeline.