The menu bar, item by item

Chapter 13 · The menu bar, item by item

Reviewed 4 November 2026 · Sources: Photopea in-application menus, Photopea learn documentation, PCMag hands-on review, developer issue tracker

This chapter is the inventory the rest of the reference points at. Where the earlier chapters explain how a capability behaves and where its edges are, this one simply lists what is in the menu bar, in the order you will find it, with the shortcut, the submenu it lives under and the one thing worth knowing before you click it. It is written to be used, not read end to end: keep it open in a second tab while you work, and jump to the menu you are staring at.

Two conventions run through the whole chapter. Items marked with an ellipsis open a dialog, which is documented in chapter 16. Items that act immediately do not. Where Photopea's menu differs from Photoshop's — either because something is missing, because something has been renamed, or because something exists here that Adobe removed — the difference is called out in the row rather than buried in prose. That comparison is the reason a menu inventory is useful at all: almost everyone arriving at Photopea already knows where the command sits in Photoshop, and the friction is entirely in the places where the two menus diverge.

File

The File menu is the largest in the application and the one that carries the most Photopea-specific behaviour, because the product has to reconcile a desktop file model with a browser sandbox. New, Open and Save are the three you will use constantly; the rest of the menu exists to bridge to storage backends, to batch operations and to the scripting layer.

Edit

Edit carries undo, the transform family, the fill and stroke commands, and the “Define New” group that turns document content into reusable resources. It is also where the preferences live, which is unusual compared with Photoshop's placement under the application menu on macOS but consistent with the Windows convention Photopea follows.

Image

Image is short and almost every item opens a dialog. The distinction that matters is between changing the pixel grid (Image Size, Crop), changing the canvas without touching pixels (Canvas Size, Rotate Canvas), and changing pixel values (the Adjustments submenu). Getting those three categories confused is the most common source of irreversible damage in a first Photopea session, because Image Size resamples and there is no non-destructive variant.

The Adjustments submenu is the destructive twin of the adjustment-layer list, and it contains the full set: Brightness/Contrast, Levels, Curves, Exposure, Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, Black & White, Photo Filter, Channel Mixer, Color Lookup, Invert, Posterize, Threshold, Gradient Map, Selective Color, Shadows/Highlights, Desaturate, Match Color, Replace Color and Equalize. Each one is documented with its controls in chapter 16. The practical rule is that anything you might want to revisit should be an adjustment layer instead, because the Image menu version bakes into pixels and is only recoverable through History.

Layer

Layer is the menu that most rewards memorising, because the shortcuts are dense and the commands are used constantly. It covers creation, ordering, grouping, the mask family, the layer-style entry point and the flattening commands. Photopea implements the full Photoshop structure here with two exceptions worth knowing: there is no Layer Comps, and there is no video layer.

Select

Select is where the document-wide selection map is managed. Every item here operates on that single map, not on a layer, which is why a selection survives a layer change and why it can be saved into a channel and recalled later. The Modify submenu is the one people forget exists, and it is the difference between a rough marquee and a usable edge.

Filter

The Filter menu is catalogued exhaustively in chapter 17, including every parameter on every filter. What matters at menu level is the ordering convention: Photopea repeats the last-used filter at the very top of the menu with its shortcut, groups the rest by family, and puts the special-interface filters — Blur Gallery, Liquify, Vanishing Point, Camera Raw, Filter Gallery — in their own entries because they open a dedicated workspace rather than a parameter dialog.

View

View is the least glamorous menu and the one that determines whether a long session is comfortable. It controls zoom, the non-printing overlays, the proofing setup and the screen modes. Two items are worth flagging: Extras is a single switch that hides every overlay at once, and Gamut Warning is a coarse approximation rather than a colour-managed soft proof, so it should not be trusted for prepress decisions.

Window

Window is the panel switchboard and the only way to open most panels, since the right-hand dock starts with a minimal set. It also carries the document list, the plugin manager and the theme and language switches. Because Photopea cannot float panels freely, this menu is effectively the workspace customiser: what you tick here is what you get in the dock.

Help

Help is thin, and that is a fair criticism of the product rather than of this inventory. There is no searchable in-app manual, no contextual help that opens the relevant learn page, and no guided tour. What exists is a set of outbound links and two diagnostic tools. For a product with this much surface area, the absence of in-application help is one of the reasons third-party references like this one get written at all.

What the menu bar tells you about the product

Read as a whole, the menu bar is a more honest description of Photopea than any feature list. The File menu is unusually deep because the product has to solve storage in a browser. The Edit menu carries a full transform family and a complete Define New group, which is the signature of a real editor rather than a toy. The Image menu has every adjustment Photoshop has, which is why people assume parity. The Layer menu is complete except for Layer Comps and video. The Select menu has the full Modify family and channel save-and-load, which is the machinery of professional masking. And then Help has seven links and no manual, which is the tell: this is one developer's product, extraordinarily deep in the engine and thin in the scaffolding around it.

The gaps that matter for a decision are not in the menus themselves but in what the menus cannot reach. There is no Layer Comps, so variant exploration is manual. There is no video timeline, so motion work stops at frame-by-frame GIF. There is no 3D menu at all. There is no automation recorder beyond Actions, and Actions cannot record every operation. None of those are hidden; they are simply absent, and the absence is easier to see in a menu inventory than in a review. Chapter 19 turns that observation into the decision guide, and chapter 14 picks up where this one leaves off, with the tool rail and the options bar that sits above the canvas.