I put together PhotoCraft Online as a place to try PhotoCraft in a browser and read through a few editing guides. You can open the editor without installing an application or creating an account. Basic editing is free.
The editor itself comes from storytold/photocraft. The upstream team and contributors built it; I host the web build and maintain the surrounding website. PhotoCraft Online is an independent site, and the version hosted here is v0.5.0.
For this post, I want to show the small checks behind the guides. A feature list gives you less to go on than an image that was opened, changed, and exported.
Starting with a small PNG
The first test used a 640 × 400 PNG: a cream background with an amber rectangle. It is a boring image on purpose. There are few places for an editing mistake to hide.
In the browser build, the check covered adding English text, undo and redo, cropping, and a brightness adjustment. The PNG export downloaded and displayed the edited image. These checks ran on macOS in Chromium with a 1280 × 720 viewport.
If you have used a layered image editor, you will recognize the arrangement: tools on the left, the document in the middle, and layers on the right. For a first try, open a copy of an image, add a short line of text, then download a PNG and open it outside the editor.
One detail matters at export time. The PNG download is a flattened image. You can use it as the finished picture, but you cannot reopen that PNG and expect to recover the text layer.
A PSD check that needed a correction
The next sample was a synthetic PSD with two raster layers named Background and Amber card.
Both layers appeared in the editor, and the visibility controls worked. The initial stacking order differed from the PSD's embedded composite, though: the background covered the amber rectangle. Moving Amber card above Background restored the expected view.
That is a useful result, with a limit. The check established that this sample could be opened and its layers manipulated. It did not establish why the initial order differed. The sample encoding and the importer both need investigation. Saving the PSD and reopening it was outside this test.
I would check my own file before relying on it for a handoff. In particular, these small samples tell us little about a document with smart objects, masks, or fonts that the browser cannot find. I have put the test details and the relevant upstream documentation in the PSD compatibility guide.
Save before you close the tab
The editor processes the images you open in the browser. PhotoCraft Online does not provide cloud document storage, so download your work before reloading or closing the tab. Keep the original file as well.
The website has English and Chinese guides. That refers to the site and its articles; I have not verified Chinese text rendering inside the editor. PhotoCraft remains in early alpha, and the upstream developers warn against treating it as a replacement for daily professional Photoshop work.
You can open the editor here. The tutorial follows a small editing workflow if you want somewhere to start.
If you try a PSD and something looks wrong, a useful report includes the browser, document dimensions, layer count, and the change you expected to see. That gives me something concrete to reproduce without asking you to share the original file.
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