On this page
Chapter 05 · Painting & filters
Painting and filters are where Photopea's engineering shows. The brush engine supports ABR import, stylus pressure, scatter, colour dynamics and pattern tips; the filter catalogue is broad enough to include Blur Gallery, Vanishing Point and a Camera Raw filter; and smart filters make most of it non-destructive. It is also where the gaps are sharpest, because Adobe Camera Raw and the missing history brushes are both felt most keenly by exactly the people who use filters heavily.
The brush engine
Photopea's brushes come in two kinds. A circular brush is generated mathematically, so it can be any size at any hardness without pixelating. A pattern brush is a raster image, and it pixelates when scaled beyond its native size. Most of the brushes you will use are circular; pattern brushes are for texture stamps and imported ABR sets.
Each brush has a size property that controls line thickness, and a brush track that places multiple copies of the brush shape along the pointer path. The Brush panel, opened from Window > Brush, exposes Tip Shape with angle, roundness and spacing, plus Tip Dynamics, Scatter and Colour Dynamics, all with a live preview and a gallery of predefined brushes. That is a smaller set of dynamics than Photoshop's, which offers additional texture, dual-brush and transfer controls, but it covers the majority of real painting needs.
Brushes import from ABR files through File > Open or by drag and drop, and export back to ABR from the Brush panel. You can also create a brush from a layer with Edit > Define New > Brush, which is how you turn a logo or a texture into a stamp. When a device supports pressure, two checkboxes appear at the top right: Stylus Pressure Controls Opacity and Stylus Pressure Controls Size. Enabling both gives the pressure-sensitive behaviour a tablet user expects.
One behaviour to internalise: when a selection is active, brush tools only edit inside it. That is usually what you want, but if a brush suddenly stops painting, the first thing to check is whether a stray selection is active. Ctrl+D will tell you immediately.
Photoshop's History Brush and Art History Brush let you paint an earlier state back into the current image, which is the standard technique for selective restoration and for painterly effects. Neither exists in Photopea. The substitute is to duplicate the layer before a destructive change, keep the original, and paint a mask on the duplicate. It works, but it is more steps and it is not the same tool.
Gradients, patterns and colour
The Gradient tool on G produces linear, radial, angle, reflected and diamond gradients. The selection is described by reviewers as good but not as extensive as Photoshop's, which is fair: the preset library is smaller and there is no gradient mesh. Gradient fill layers, gradient layer style overlays and the gradient tool itself are all supported, so gradients can be applied destructively, non-destructively as a fill layer, or as a live style.
Patterns are fully supported, including pattern fill layers and pattern strokes in layer styles. Edit > Define New > Pattern creates a pattern from the current layer, which is the fastest way to build a repeating texture from a selection. The Eyedropper on I samples colour from the canvas, X swaps foreground and background, and D resets them to black and white. Clicking either colour swatch opens the picker.
The filter catalogue
The filter menu is organised the way Photoshop's is, and the coverage is broad. The tables below list what is present in each group, with notes only where the behaviour is not obvious from the name.
| Blur | What it does |
|---|---|
| Average | Averages the entire image to a single colour; useful for removing a colour cast |
| Blur / Blur More | Light uniform blur; Blur More is roughly three to four times stronger |
| Box Blur | Average of nearby colours; fast but can produce visible banding |
| Gaussian Blur | Bell-curve weighted blur; the standard softening tool |
| Lens Blur | Depth-of-field simulation with focal distance, iris shape and radius |
| Motion Blur | Directional blur with angle and distance |
| Radial Blur | Zoom or spin motion simulation |
| Surface Blur | Edge-preserving blur; the standard skin-smoothing filter |
| Blur Gallery | Interface and behaviour |
|---|---|
| Field Blur | Single-point blur with variable values; multiple points build complex depth maps |
| Iris Blur | Elliptical zone with zero blur at the centre, graduating outward |
| Tilt-Shift | Linear axis of sharpness with graduated blur either side |
| Path Blur | Line segments with speed and direction per endpoint |
| Spin Blur | Elliptical rotational blur |
Blur Gallery is worth calling out separately because it uses a different interaction model: the controls are manipulated on the canvas rather than in a dialog, with pins and handles drawn over the image. That is a more modern way of working than the modal dialogs used elsewhere in the filter menu, and it is the same model Photoshop adopted. If you have only used Gaussian Blur, the gallery is worth exploring for portrait and product work, where graduated depth of field reads as photographic rather than as a filter.
| Group | Filters present |
|---|---|
| Sharpen | Smart Sharpen (added v4.1), Unsharp Mask, Sharpen, Sharpen Edges, Sharpen More |
| Noise | Add Noise, Despeckle, Dust & Scratches, Median, Reduce Noise; Surface Blur and Median also appear here |
| Distort | Wave (v4.1), Ripple, Twirl, Pinch, Polar Coordinates, Spherize, ZigZag, Displace, Shear |
| Pixelate | Mezzotint (v4.1), Mosaic, Colour Halftone, Crystallize, Facet, Fragment, Pointillize |
| Render | Clouds, Difference Clouds, Fibers, Lens Flare, Lighting Effects |
| Stylize | Emboss, Find Edges, Glowing Edges, Solarize, Wind, Tiles, Extrude, Trace Contour |
| Other | High Pass, Custom, Maximum, Minimum, Offset |
Two notes on this list. The developer has claimed that Surface Blur and Median run faster in Photopea than in Photoshop or GIMP, which is plausible given the implementation approach and worth testing on your own hardware rather than taking on faith. And the Filter Gallery provides a stacking interface for the artistic, brush-stroke, sketch and texture filters, with two additional filters added in version 4.1. It is the fastest way to audition several stylistic treatments at once.
Smart filters
Smart filters are applied non-destructively to smart objects. The filter stack appears under the smart object layer, each entry can be reopened and re-edited, each can be enabled or disabled independently, and each has its own raster mask so the effect can be hidden in specific areas. All adjustments and filters can be applied this way. This is the single most important workflow feature in the filter system, because it turns filters from a one-way operation into something you can revise after seeing the result in context.
The Camera Raw filter and its missing panels
Filter > Camera Raw Filter provides a Light panel, a Color panel and an Effects panel containing texture, clarity and dehaze. That is a useful subset for quick tonal work on a flattened image. It is not Adobe Camera Raw, and the missing pieces are the ones professionals rely on: vignette and grain, tone curve, colour mixer, colour grading, detail and sharpening, optics and lens profiles, geometry and calibration.
The developer's response to a request to update it was unusually candid: each missing panel represents roughly two weeks of work, and users were asked to nominate which single panel they wanted first. No timeline was committed. Treat the Camera Raw filter as a convenience for light adjustments, not as a replacement for a RAW workflow. If you need lens corrections or a proper tone curve, do that work before the file reaches Photopea.
Vanishing Point
Vanishing Point defines three-dimensional planar surfaces in a photograph so that content placed or cloned onto them follows the correct perspective. You create planes with the Crop tool, add adjacent planes by Ctrl-dragging, and then paint or clone inside the plane with the Brush and Stamp tools. Marquee plus Transform places content on a plane, and Ctrl+V pastes directly into one.
This is a small piece of history worth knowing: Adobe removed Vanishing Point from Photoshop and replaced it with Substance 3D features, while Photopea retains it. For architectural retouching, packaging mockups and any job that involves cloning along a receding surface, Photopea therefore has a capability that current Photoshop does not. It is one of the few places where the free tool is strictly ahead.
Liquify
Liquify pushes pixels with an adjustable brush size, and it is the tool for subtle shape correction: straightening an edge, reducing a bulge, adjusting a jawline. It is destructive when applied to a raster layer, so apply it to a smart object if you may need to revise it. The absence of a full mesh-based Liquify with freeze masks and reconstruct modes is a limitation compared with Photoshop, but the push tool covers most everyday use.
What this chapter means in practice
For painting, Photopea is good enough for illustration but not for painters who depend on a deep custom brush library and history-brush techniques. For filters, the catalogue is broad, Blur Gallery is genuinely well implemented, smart filters are fully functional, and Vanishing Point is a genuine advantage over current Photoshop. The Camera Raw filter is the weak point and should not be relied on for professional raw development. Chapter 8 covers the AI filters, which are a separate and much smaller set.