Photo Studio — the complete guide

Photo Studio is a layered photo editor that runs entirely in your browser. It covers the work people usually open a paid app or an upload-first website for — adjusting a photo, cutting out a subject, removing something from the background, adding a headline, sizing it for a post — with one difference that shapes everything else: nothing is uploaded. The adjustments run on your graphics chip through WebGL, the three AI models run on your own device, and your document autosaves in your own browser.

This page is the reference. To just start, open Photo Studio and drop in a photo.

The editor at a glance

  • Left — tools: Move & transform (V), Crop (C), Draw (B), Erase & restore (E), Remove objects (J), Text (T), Shapes (U) and Pan (H).
  • Centre — the canvas. A bar at the top shows the settings of the tool in use.
  • Right — three tabs (Adjust, Layer, AI tools) above the layers list.

Opening and starting

Drop a photo anywhere on the editor, press Open image, or paste an image from the clipboard. The document takes the photo's size. Photos larger than 8,192 pixels on their longest side are opened at that size, and the editor tells you when it does. It opens PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, AVIF, BMP and SVG; iPhone HEIC photos need converting first. To design from scratch, choose New canvas and a size — Instagram post or portrait, Story, YouTube thumbnail, Facebook cover, X header, LinkedIn banner, A4 or Full HD — with a white, black or transparent background. Images dropped onto an open document become new layers, placed where you drop them.

Layers

Every photo, text, shape and drawing is a layer. The list shows the top layer first: click to select, drag to reorder, double-click a name to rename, and use the eye and lock buttons to hide or protect a layer. Each layer has its own opacity and one of 16 blend modes — Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Soft light, Colour and the rest. Merge visible into a new layer flattens what you see into a single photo layer, leaving the originals in place.

With the Move tool, drag a layer to move it; it snaps to the centre and edges of the canvas. Drag a corner to resize, the round handle to rotate (hold ⇧ for 15° steps), and use the arrow keys to nudge by a pixel, or ten with ⇧. The Layer tab has exact position, scale and rotation, flips, centring, and buttons to fit a layer inside the canvas or fill it.

Adjustments and looks

Adjustments belong to a layer and never change its pixels, so they can be revisited or reset at any time. There are 17 sliders in four groups:

  • Light — exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks.
  • Colour — temperature, tint, vibrance, saturation and hue.
  • Detail — clarity, sharpen and blur.
  • Effects — vignette, grain and fade.

Exposure and white balance are applied in linear light, the way a raw converter applies them, so warming a photo does not muddy its shadows. Double-click a slider's name to reset it. Looks are starting points built from the same sliders — Vivid, Warm, Cool, Matte, Film, Punch, Soft, Moody, Golden hour, Mono and Noir — previewed on your own photo; choosing one sets the sliders, which you can then change. Auto reads the photo's histogram and corrects exposure, contrast and colour cast conservatively.

Text and shapes

With the Text tool, click where the text should go and type. Choose from ten typefaces — Inter, Montserrat, Poppins, Bebas Neue, Anton, Oswald, Roboto, Playfair Display, Permanent Marker and Lobster — and set weight, size, colour, alignment, line height, letter spacing and capitals. An outline, a soft shadow and a background box behind the text are under Outline, shadow & box. Shapes are rectangles (with rounded corners), ellipses and lines, each with a fill and a border. Both stay editable: they are redrawn at full resolution when you export, however large.

Drawing, erasing and masks

Draw paints on a drawing layer with a size, softness, colour and opacity; press [ and ] to change the size. Erase & restore never deletes pixels: it paints the selected layer's mask, so an erased area can be brought back by switching to Restore. A layer with a mask shows a mask badge in the list, and the Layer tab can invert or delete the mask.

The AI tools

All three models are served from this site and run on your device. The first use of each downloads it once.

  • Remove background finds the main subject and hides everything else with a mask (the model is about 40 MB). Refine the edge with Erase & restore, then put a colour or a blurred copy of the photo behind the subject in one click.
  • Remove objects fills in whatever you paint over — a passer-by, a wire, a blemish, a watermark you own. Paint, then press Remove. It uses the LaMa model on your processor; each pass takes around half a minute on a typical laptop, and larger areas need more passes. Fast runs one, Most detail up to twelve.
  • AI upscale enlarges a photo 2× (Swin2SR) or 4× (Real-ESRGAN), adding detail rather than blur. It takes images up to about 400 × 400 pixels, because it is heavy work: on a processor without a graphics card that size already takes a few minutes, and the panel shows an estimate before you start. A photo that fills the canvas takes the canvas up with it.

Clean up, beside Auto adjust, smooths noise and JPEG blocking and sharpens real edges without any model. How fast the models run depends on your device: with a graphics card that supports WebGPU some run much faster, and in browsers without it they run on the processor.

Cropping and resizing

The Crop tool shows a box over the canvas: drag its corners or drag inside it to move it, choose a ratio (free, original, 1:1, 4:5, 3:2, 16:9, 9:16), and press Enter or Apply. With nothing selected, the Layer tab shows the canvas: Canvas size adds or trims space around the layers, Resize image scales everything together, and the background can be a colour or transparent.

Exporting

Export (⌘E) saves PNG, JPEG or WebP at 25% to 200% of the canvas size, with a quality setting for JPEG and WebP and a transparent background for PNG and WebP. Exports are rendered again at full resolution with exactly the same code as the screen, so what you see is what you get. Copy image to clipboard is in the Open menu. Enlarging on export smooths pixels; for real added detail, use AI upscale first.

Undo and autosave

⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z undo and redo up to 80 steps. A slider drag, a layer drag or a brush stroke counts as one step. The document and its images autosave to your browser's storage on this device, so it is still there when you come back. Clearing this site's data in your browser removes it; Close document removes it deliberately.

Keyboard shortcuts

  • V C B E J T U H — tools; hold Space to pan with any tool
  • ⌘0 fit, ⌘1 100%, ⌘+/⌘− zoom; pinch or ⌘-scroll to zoom at the pointer
  • ⌘J duplicate layer, Delete delete layer, Esc deselect or cancel
  • ⌘O open, ⌘E export

Privacy, precisely

Your photo is read from disk by the page and processed on your own device. The adjustment shaders, the fonts and the three models are served from this site rather than a third-party CDN, so no other party learns what you opened. The document is stored in your browser on this device and nowhere else.

Ready? Open Photo Studio, or use a single tool: remove a background, remove an object or upscale an image.