You probably already know about some free (or almost free) Photoshop alternatives. Photopea is an online-based Photoshop clone which works in your web browser. It’s accessible to anyone, contains plenty of advanced features – and it’s completely free.

Programmer Ivan Kutskir from the Czech Republic is the man behind Photopea. He writes that it was merely a hobby project during college and he still works on it by himself. It took 7,000 hours of work (around 5 hours a day during 3.5 years) for Ivan to start making some money out of Photopea. Still, the software doesn’t generate income from subscriptions, but from advertisements.

I think that Photopea can come in handy if you don’t feel like starting Photoshop for whichever reason. I see it as a great solution if you need to edit images on someone else’s computer. For example, it makes things a lot easier for me when making lead images for articles. I sometimes work at mom’s place, so now don’t have to bring my laptop, I can just work from hers and edit images online.

Other than using Photopea in a browser, you can even install it as an app in Windows. Go to More > Install Photopea, and it will sit in your taskbar.

Out of curiosity, I played with Photopea a little bit. I only did some basic editing (Gradient Map, Curves, some filters), and everything works just fine. I can’t say it’s the fastest-responsive program there is, but please take into account that I have a very crappy laptop. On a decent computer, I believe it should work just fine. Make sure to try it out, and let us know your impressions.

[via DPReview, Reddit]