ArcBrush – Node-based 2D image editor

https://pixieditor.net/

Free and open source and, as far as I can tell, does everything this is claiming to do and more. It's part of our workflow for the game my son and I are making.

edit: minus the AI stuff

Node editing is great for certain pro workflows, but it’s not as user-friendly as programmers assume. And for pros, there are times when text-based scripts are actually easier to parse.

Source: I launched a node based video compositing tool 20 years ago and watched people struggle compared to the layer-based workflows they were used to.

I can’t tell if I love or hate the idea of this.

On the hate side, ComfyUI is just so, so difficult to use on a normal size screen with a trackpad. It’s designed for someone with a 34” gamer monitor and a mouse with like six buttons, and I haven’t seen a good working node based interface that would be comfortable on a Mac or iPad, so I feel frustrated just looking at the images and thinking about zooming in / out and arranging the nodes.

On the love side, everting the workflow into the main thing is really interesting and clearly a thing people who do graphics in production need. Photoshop has a history palette, but it just does not do (easily) what this lets you do, which is be process first, and automate the process.

Anyway, not for me I think, and I’d like to imagine there’s a better UI waiting to be developed to do some of this, but I think it’s cool and interesting to see new ideas in graphics production.

This is either an extremely weird timing coincidence... Or someone saw the announcement/devlog of Plasma Studio and decided to vibe-code-front-run it as a paid offering. This page appeared 3 weeks ago.

Original video a month ago for the plasma studio which is basically the same thing: https://youtu.be/WlgrCqgnk-M

Devlog #1 https://youtu.be/JDsoKhgNtHQ

More design / timelines https://youtu.be/L1O2ALT0A14

If Mari (texture painting app) and Nuke (vfx compositor) had a baby together it would be the perfect node based photoshop alternative. The brushes of Mari are insanely good and color editing on nuke is a dream.

I've occasionally looked around for a node-based image editor (á la Blender, but for 2D), and I've only found simple proofs-of-concept. When discussing Photoshop alternatives, I often find the lack of smart layers and other non-destructive editing to be a painful gap; this is a bit of a paradigm shift towards the other extreme.

How does it compare to graphite.rs ?

Interesting. I’m in the process of making a node based image editor myself so I’ll see what this does right and what points of friction still remain. The main reason I want to do is to make automating tasks easier, batch processing in photoshop is ok, but it could be so much better.

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