Web-based image editor modeled after Deluxe Paint

(github.com)

230 points | by bananaboy 21 hours ago

15 comments

  • pjmlp 23 minutes 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.
  • badsectoracula 14 hours 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 11 hours 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/
      • badsectoracula 10 hours ago
        I tried the dev version on Firefox and didn't seem to fix the issue though it was "reversed" in that things became brighter now. On Falkon it worked better though there was still some weird coloration for pixels that shouldn't have been altered - see the images i attached in the bug report.

        Also in both cases the brush area remained intact (it was just 'moving around') instead of being smudged, it is more obvious in the Firefox shot because i only did a simple circular motion but can also be seen in the Falkon shot in that there is a floating corner at the top right corner of the orange box that was 'dragged' from the left side (i was doing a horizontal motion to show that the pixels above the brush were affected even though there wasn't any vertical motion to push the orange colors up to the blue area).

  • mamonoleechi 2 hours ago
    Somewhat related: Grafx 2 Deluxepaint clone for DOS/Windows http://grafx2.chez.com/
  • augusteo 8 hours 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 5 hours ago
      Yeah, I'm sick of endless JavaScript libraries that assume that everyone and everything has Node installed.
  • roskelld 16 hours 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 16 hours 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.
  • socalgal2 12 hours 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 10 hours 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 10 hours 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.
  • Aldipower 17 hours 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.
  • newsoftheday 15 hours 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.

  • Grom_PE 8 hours 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.

  • dizzy9 13 hours ago
    Another Deluxe Paint clone is PyDPainter. It's Python-based and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The UI is very much reminiscent of the original.

    https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter

  • kosolam 18 hours 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.
  • heliumtera 17 hours 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.

  • baudaux 19 hours ago
    Is it simple to adapt file open/save in order to embed it in https://exaequos.com ?