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Web-based image editor modeled after Deluxe Paint

250 points| bananaboy | 1 month ago |github.com

30 comments

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badsectoracula|1 month ago

This is neat, some years ago i also thought of making a simple DPaint clone (though much simpler than what this project seems to do) and started by... painting the tool icons, then losing interest :-P. I did end up reusing them for a pixelart editing component for Lazarus though[0] (and put the icons in my "Bad-Common-Icons" icon set[1] that i use for my GUI programs). But i do want to, at some point, tackle making something like Paint Shop Pro 7 (for desktop, not web) because i think it has the best UX of all image editing programs (including later versions of PSP which i never liked).

That said, i played with this a bit and found some bug with the smudge tool blending[2]. It also seems browser-related as it has different behavior in Firefox and Falkon (which uses QtWebEngine / Chromium). Also the way opacity works with the smudge tool feels weird/wrong as even at 1% it seems to affect the image a lot even though it should barely make a difference.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/kht16dJ.png

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/icons/

[2] https://github.com/steffest/DPaint-js/issues/50

Steffest|1 month ago

Indeed! Blending colors is surprisingly hard. I've pushed an update that addresses most of your concerns. Not perfect yet, but an improvement. Dev version with these changes on https://www.stef.be/dpaint/dev/

roskelld|1 month ago

Steffest was just showing off his entry for the color cycling competition at GERP 2026 which uses a few of his tools to produce including DPaint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyB5cvA6f78

EDIT: I see he posted a link at the bottom of the Readme.md I guess I should have scrolled to the bottom first.

VimEscapeArtist|1 month ago

I've been following this app for a while. Worth noting that the author is also a very talented graphic artist and demoscener. Works created with this tool frequently appear in various demoscene compos.

Shorel|1 month ago

At this point I wish that there was some native alternative to the Web-based everything.

wxWidgets is oldschool, QT has license issues, GTK looks so-so except on Linux, TCL/TK looks ugly everywhere.

In the modern world we need some GPU accelerated GUI library. Something like the one used in SublimeText. But with BSD or MIT license of course.

That would be much more interesting for me.

VZ|1 month ago

> wxWidgets is oldschool

It's a bit sad that a GUI library absolutely needs to be new and shining to be even considered nowadays, it looks like the whole programming world got infected by JS ecosystem anything-that-is-more-than-3-months-old-is-obsolete mindset.

The old that is strong does not wither.

ogoffart|1 month ago

> I wish that there was some native alternative to the Web-based everything.

I suggest Slint (https://slint.dev)

augusteo|1 month ago

The vanilla JS with zero dependencies is refreshing. Looking through the code, it's surprisingly readable for something handling Amiga file formats and color cycling.

The demoscene connection makes sense. That community has always valued doing more with less.

VerifiedReports|1 month ago

Yeah, I'm sick of endless JavaScript libraries that assume that everyone and everything has Node installed.

socalgal2|1 month ago

How is this like DeluxePaint? For me DeluxePaint's defining feature is how brushes work. You press B, you select some pixels, those pixels immediately become your brush that you draw with

https://classicreload.com/play/dosx-deluxe-paint-animation.h...

This clone doesn't do that, therefore it's not remotely like Deluxe Paint and it's disingenously to claim it's modeled on it.

badsectoracula|1 month ago

It isn't in the linked version but it is in the dev version which also has some further brush enhancements. It seems the brush stuff are still being worked on.

antod|1 month ago

My vague memories of DP are centered around the custom ranges for cycling through color palettes. A talented artist could make simple animated scenes.

aidenn0|1 month ago

And you can paint brushes with perspective as well.

Aldipower|1 month ago

Nice! The code looks pretty neat! And also somehow clean. I like those projects, without all those boring constraints you have in "enterprise" or even worse start-up code.

kosolam|1 month ago

Nice. Vanilla js with a pretty clean code. From a quick look there is some components architecture and they are decoupled via an events bus. I used to implement evented architectures in winform apps in the past. On the one hand it may seem insane but in practice it was a really good choice.

newsoftheday|1 month ago

I appreciate the nostalgia of it but DPII was a light themed tool, this one is dark themed, difficult for me to read.

I run DPII in DoxBox on Linux like this:

dosbox DP.EXE

Something I don't see in your app is the Perspective tool.

pjmlp|1 month ago

While this is a great piece of work, lets take a second to consider how much resources the Amiga 500 had, and how much is needed to run this clone.

Grom_PE|1 month ago

Deluxe Paint 2 for DOS was my favorite drawing program, so had to check this out, pretty nice!

The only thing that stops me from recommending it is non-integer zoom levels, which is especially bad for pixel art.

Moving layers around was also confusing, had to click Layer → Transform → Free Transform to be able to move things around. It would be much more obvious if there was a move icon in the tool panel that does just that.

heliumtera|1 month ago

Source code is very readable and very comfortable to use application.

This is surprising given it's a web application in modern age, did not expect that.

tonixx|1 month ago

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