One editor, not a drawer of separate tools
Layers, blend modes, selections, masks and adjustments, in a browser, with no account and nothing uploaded.
It opens a Photoshop file with its layers intact and saves one back out. It opens an ordinary photograph too, and everything else on this site that touches an image is this editor with a tool already chosen for you.
It is not Photoshop, and it is not Photopea either, which is one person's work since 2013 and genuinely remarkable. What is here is the part most people need, built properly.
Selections are the thing that makes it an editor
A pile of separate filters is not an editor. What turns it into one is being able to say this bit, not that bit, and have everything else honour it.
There are five ways to make a selection: rectangle, ellipse, freehand lasso, polygon lasso and the magic wand. They all produce the same thing, so they combine freely. Make a rough lasso, switch to Subtract and take a bite out of it, switch to Add and include something else.
Then every operation respects it. A brush stroke stops at the edge. An adjustment only touches what is inside. Delete knocks a hole in the layer. Turn it into a layer mask and it hides rather than deletes, so it can be switched back on later.
Selection edges are antialiased rather than jagged, which is why a selected circle has a smooth edge instead of a staircase, and they can be feathered or grown after the fact.
Blurring something out
The alternatives are all worse in the same specific way.
Every free blur-a-face site works by uploading the photograph. You send the picture you were trying to protect to a stranger's server so that it can protect it. Whatever the retention policy says, the file has been somewhere you do not control.
Here it never moves. Select the face with the ellipse or the lasso and press Blur out. The radius is calculated from the size of what you selected rather than being a fixed number, which matters more than it sounds: six pixels of blur obliterates a face in a small image and barely touches one in a photo off a modern phone.
It is drawn into the pixels, so the exported file has no original underneath it and nothing to peel off. Be generous with the area, because a partially blurred face is still a face to somebody who knows them, and look at the whole frame before you send it: a house number, a name badge or a reflection identifies people as reliably as a face does.
Layers, blend modes and masks
Every layer has a blend mode, an opacity, an optional mask and the option to clip to the layer below it.
All sixteen Photoshop blend modes are here, including the four awkward ones, hue, saturation, colour and luminosity. They are not approximations: they are the same operations, because a browser canvas has had them built in for years, which is most of the reason this is possible without a server.
A mask hides part of a layer without deleting it. That distinction is one of the more useful habits in image editing: masked pixels are still in the file, so switching the mask off brings them straight back, whereas an eraser has thrown them away and you find out two hours later.
The tools
- Move. Pick the layer you want in the panel on the right.
- Rectangle and ellipse select. Drag out an area. Combine with the mode buttons.
- Lasso. Freehand, closed automatically wherever you let go.
- Polygon lasso. Click each corner, click the first point again to close, Escape to cancel.
- Magic wand. Click a colour to select everything like it. Tolerance decides how alike.
- Crop. Drag, then Enter or Apply.
- Brush and eraser. Size and softness. Both stop at the selection edge.
- Paint bucket. Fills the region the wand would have selected.
- Text. Click where it starts. It arrives as its own layer.
- Pan. Or scroll to zoom, and Fit to get back.
Each tool has a single-key shortcut. Ctrl+Z undoes, Ctrl+A selects all, Ctrl+D deselects, and Delete knocks out whatever is selected.
Saving it
PNG flattens the stack and exports at full resolution, whatever zoom you are looking at, because zoom is only a preview.
PSD keeps the layers, so you can carry on in Photoshop, or come back here tomorrow and pick up where you left off. That is worth doing before you flatten anything.
Nothing is added to the image. No watermark, no corner logo, no resolution held back for a paid tier.
Why it runs on your machine
Every browser has had a capable graphics engine in it for years. Editing an image does not need a server, and the only reason so many free editors use one is that a server gives them somewhere to put an account, a queue and an upgrade button.
Doing it locally means no upload wait, no file size cap, no daily limit, and no copy of your photograph sitting on somebody else's disk under a retention policy you have to take on trust. Open your network tab and watch nothing happen while you work.
Common questions
Is this really free, with no account?
Yes. No sign up, no email address, no trial, no export limit and nothing written on your picture. There is no server to pay for, because the editing happens on your own machine, so there is nothing to charge you for.
Are my photos uploaded?
No. The image is opened by your browser and never leaves the machine, which is the reason to use it over anything else. That matters for the things people edit: photographs of their house, their children, their van, an injury, or a screenshot with an account number on it.
Can it open PSD files?
Yes, with the layers intact rather than as a flattened preview. Names, blend modes, opacity, groups, clipping and layer masks all come through, you can edit any of it, and it saves a real PSD back out. What does not survive is listed on the page, because a converter that loses something quietly is worse than one that says so.
How do I blur out a face or a number plate?
Select it with the ellipse or the lasso, then press Blur out in the Adjust panel. The radius is worked out from the size of what you selected, so it destroys the detail rather than softening it, which matters because a partially blurred face is still recognisable to anybody who knows the person. It is drawn into the pixels, so there is nothing to peel off the exported file.
What can I select with?
Rectangle, ellipse, freehand lasso, polygon lasso and the magic wand, and they all combine: hold the mode buttons to add, subtract or intersect one with another. A selection can be feathered, grown, inverted or turned into a layer mask. Everything else in the editor respects it, so a brush stroke, a filter or an adjustment only affects what is inside.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes, though a real screen and a mouse make the drawing tools far easier to use. The panels move below the picture on a narrow screen.
Why is the export bigger or smaller than I expected?
The picture is exported at its full resolution regardless of how far in or out you are zoomed, because zoom is only a preview. If you cropped, the export is the size of the crop. The file size depends on the format and the quality slider: JPG for photographs, PNG when you need sharp edges and no loss, WebP when you want the smallest file.