ImageCraft: A Free Photoshop-Style Editor in Your Browser (Layers, Masks, AI Select)

Most free online photo editor results fall into two buckets: filter toys that slap a preset on your image, or watered-down web ports that hide the useful tools behind a paywall. ImageCraft is neither. It's a layer-based editor in the Photoshop mold that runs entirely in your browser, and the editor itself is free for every account. Real pixel layers, layer masks, adjustment layers, a Layer Style dialog, 16 blend modes, a stamp-based brush engine, and a full selection suite up to and including AI Select. Here's a tour of what's in it, plus the parts that still have rough edges.

A real layer stack, not a filter strip

Open ImageCraft and you land on a blank 1920 × 1080 transparent artboard with a File / Edit / Image / Layer / Help menu bar across the top, a tool strip down the left, and a Properties panel stacked over the Layers panel on the right. Drop an image in and it becomes the Background layer. Drop a second one and it stacks as a new layer named after the file, which is exactly the behavior you want and exactly what most web editors get wrong.

Layers come in four kinds: pixel layers you paint on, adjustment layers, fill layers, and parametric shape layers (there's a text tool too, with 27 fonts shared with our PDF Creator). Each layer gets its own opacity, blend mode (16 of them), visibility toggle, lock, and optional layer mask. Masks are proper grayscale rasters: white reveals, black hides, and you paint them with any tool while the mask thumbnail is selected. Density and Feather sliders shape a mask non-destructively, and a Refine row smooths, expands, or contracts the edge. Clipping masks work as well; there's a "Clip to layer below" toggle that limits an adjustment to the layer underneath it.

Adjustment layers, Levels, and a working Curves editor

The adjustment menu has 17 types. The headliners are Levels (per-channel, with a live luminance histogram of the layers below) and Curves, an interactive curve editor where a click adds a point, a drag moves it, and a double-click removes it. The rest cover the classics: Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, Black & White with per-channel weights, Channel Mixer, Selective Color with nine color ranges, Photo Filter, Exposure, Vibrance, Gradient Map, and more. Every adjustment layer is created with its own mask, and if a selection is active when you create it, the mask starts from the selection. That one detail makes local color work (brighten just the sky, desaturate just the foreground) feel like the real thing.

The selection suite: marquee to marching ants to AI

Selections are where cheap editors give up first, so this got a lot of attention. The Marquee group (key M) covers rectangular, elliptical, single row, and single column, with Shift constraining to a perfect square or circle and a live W × H pixel readout that trails the corner as you drag. The object group (key W) holds Quick Selection (a brush that grows over similar pixels), Magic Wand with a tolerance slider and a contiguous toggle, and Object Selection, which extracts the subject inside a box you drag. Shift adds to any selection and Alt subtracts, the same muscle memory you already have.

Then there's AI Select, a real Segment Anything implementation: click an object and the model masks it. The Fast tier runs a quantized SlimSAM model entirely on your device, free, with no upload. The first use downloads about 14 MB of model weights and the first click on an image takes a few seconds to compute the embedding; clicks after that come back in under a second. Two paid tiers exist for harder images: AI Basic (5 tokens, a sharper SAM2 model on our server, analysis charged once per image and clicks free after) and GPU+ (10 tokens, the same BiRefNet matte engine our background remover uses, best for hair and fur). For most selections the free classic tools and Fast tier get you there.

Layer styles, done as a proper dialog

Layer effects live in a Photoshop-style Layer Style dialog: nine effects with enable checkboxes down the left, the selected effect's settings on the right, and a live preview on the canvas while you tweak. Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer and Inner Glow, Bevel & Emboss, Stroke, Color Overlay, Gradient Overlay, and Pattern Overlay. OK keeps the session, Cancel or Esc reverts the whole thing as one undo entry. Effects are non-destructive metadata on the layer, they show as nested rows under it, and they work on shape and text layers too.

A brush engine with actual tips

The brush is stamp-based, the way real paint engines work: a tip shape with hardness falloff gets stamped along your stroke with spacing, scatter, jitter, flow, and pen pressure. Right-click the canvas with the Brush or Eraser active and you get the brush menu: Size, Hardness, and Flow sliders, a tip workspace where you drag to rotate and squeeze the tip, and 20 presets from Soft Round through Airbrush, Chalk, Watercolor, Splatter, Spray Paint, and Smoke, each with a live stroke thumbnail rendered by the actual engine. Size runs from a crisp single pixel up to 1,000 px, with [ and ] stepping it from the keyboard.

Beyond painting, Free Transform (Ctrl+G, because the browser reserves Ctrl+T for a new tab) scales proportionally by default, and holding Shift distorts, the reverse of Photoshop's convention and honestly the saner default. Right-click during a transform for Skew, Distort, and a full Warp mode with a bendable Bézier grid. There's also a Shapes tool with editable parametric layers, a gradient tool with an on-canvas gizmo (Linear, Radial, Diamond, Reflected), a custom color picker used everywhere, and a Remove tool for healing. Remove has two modes: the Standard client-side fill is free and unlimited, and a ✨ Cloud mode (5 tokens) runs a LaMa inpainting model that rebuilds texture. Standard always runs first, so a failed cloud call never leaves a hole.

Why this free online photo editor is actually free

Everything runs client-side on an HTML canvas. There's no render farm to pay for, so we don't need to ration your edits, watermark exports, or lock Curves behind a subscription. Unless you use one of the optional cloud AI features, your image never leaves your machine. What paid plans add is storage for saved projects (the free plan includes 100 MB, enough for a handful of layered files) plus tokens for the cloud AI. A free account gets the whole editor, PNG export at full resolution, and project saves that restore your exact layer stack, masks and effects included, when you reopen them.

Limits worth knowing before you commit to a big edit: undo history holds 14 whole-stack snapshots, there's no vector pen tool yet (the Paths tab is a placeholder), and no PSD import. For heavy retouching on 50-layer documents, desktop Photoshop is still the tool. For everything short of that, thumbnails, composites, color grading, cutouts, meme-tier layer work, a browser tab now covers it.

ImageCraft is one of three free editors on ClipCraft, next to VideoCraft for video and SoundCraft, a full browser DAW. Same deal on all three: the editor is free, and you only ever pay for storage or AI compute.