Online Photo Editing Gets Curves and 42MP Images Support

In this article, you’ll learn:

Hi, picsers!

Some of you were upset by the fact that we haven’t released a new version of Pics.io for a while. We even got several “angry” letters made of newspaper articles :) Now you know there has been a good reason for it — we’ve been busy building our photo editor from the scratch. And now…

Edit is here! We didn’t just update our editor, we also made it available for everyone via web-address Raw.pics.io.

Stephen Shankland of CNET wrote a post “Pics.io Edit aims for better online photo editing” where he shares his experience and perspective on the photo editor by us. You should check it out. Or just keep reading.

I’ll quickly describe why it’s a huge step forward.

Breathtaking architecture

Perhaps, you’ve already clicked one of the links above and visited our photo editor.

Don’t be hasty… We do understand that it requires much work. It isn’t realistic to deliver polished full-fledged in 3 months (that’s the time we were engineering the current version of the editor).

In fact, the most exciting part is still under the hood. Most of the time we spent challenging modern browsers to take computational tasks they’ve never done. Flash-based editors you’ll find on the Internet experience performance issues dealing with large images. Many of them limit maximum file size to 20–25 megapixels or less. It was clear that we must be better at this. It took time, but we figured out how to process images up to 42 megapixels right inside an average modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) without any plugins at all.

No more ‘little preview windows’

That thing bothered me and my teammates the most. If you’re following us for some time you know that we used preview window to apply adjustments (due to some performance issues). God, we hated that preview window :)

It was clear that we must get rid of it. At least for the most of the corrections. And we did it. Now you can see the result of your processing on the entire image.

32-bit depth colors

I’ll just cite our informational page here:

“Photo editing is all about mathematical transformations. The more precision you have during number crunching the more accurate results you’ll get in the end. We didn’t want to repeat “youth mistakes” of GIMP and Photoshop and made all of our tools work with the most precise 32 bit depth numbers from the start.”

Curves

‘Curves’ tool is a really important one. Dozens of tools inside image editors are based on this single instrument. It’s also one of the best ways to add contrast and do some basic color toning.