Readit NewsThe company is hostile and scummy, and the tech is only slightly above alternatives in most cases.
It survives today on pure inertia, because everyone knows it. Which feels absurd to me- worst idea wins because it's the one everyone knows. And we'll keep using it so that the next generation only know that one thing.
Great for Adobe's profitability, awful for humanity.
Photopea has a CMYK mode, which is great, but despite the document being in CMYK mode the swatches adjacent are RGB. A useful approach would be to automatically convert RGB swatches to the destination colour space, since that's how they look when one uses them.
I also noticed the layer blending modes were undertaken in the RGB colour space rather than CMYK despite the document colour mode setting. This difference produces different results especially if using the transparency modes screen and multiply which behave a fair bit differently in the CMYK colour mode versus the RGB colour mode. A person that opens the Photopea PSD in photoshop would thus see a different result which the Photopea user did not intend.
Next I noticed that the channel management for the CMYK plates and specials provided no ability to set or manage the specials plate. For example when utilising a pantone colour one would need to establish an additional plate and input the LAB value for the ink, there didn't seem to be any way of doing that, however it supported what was already in the sample PSD file I loaded into it.
I didn't delve into colour profiles and control over dot gain, but that is another aspect which is usually absent in Photoshop alternatives.
Also just rehashing that the above is not expert-level, anyone in the industry would be familiar with these concepts and find themselves needing to manage them for production output. This is what I mean when I say to people "you don't need photoshop, get something better", non-industry people don't need to be fussing over whether the document intention should be perceptual or absolute (or seldom used middle-grounds), what is the output LPI, or device pixel requirements, what byte order is supported by the RIP, what their ink weights maximums are, or adjusting screen angles to deter plate mottling.
People will say that GIMP cannot compete with Photoshop in some use cases, I'm just happy that I don't have to worry about those and it's completely sufficient for what I want to do, same with LibreOffice vs MS Office and other imperfect FOSS projects. They might not always be the best choice out there, but they’re almost always decent.