README

Compositor

Adobe Photoshop costs too much and tools like GIMP don’t feel familiar enough for me to stay in flow. That’s why I built Compositor.

The goal was to create a full-featured image editor that is completely free and open source. I used to use Photoshop for compositing and post-processing, so Compositor is built around that workflow - with the tools needed to create a pixel-perfect final image.

Because it’s open source, you can download the Xcode project and add, remove, or modify any feature to fit your workflow.

 Installation

 Download
Get Compositor from robbietilton.com/compositor, or download the latest release directly from GitHub Releases.

 Homebrew

sh
brew install --cask robbietilton-compositor


 Features

 Layers
- Layers and folders, with opacity and Photoshop's full set of blend modes in its order — a folder's opacity dims everything inside it
- Layer masks: paint, fill, invert, blur and feather them anywhere on the canvas, past the layer's own pixels; link or unlink them to transform a mask on its own
- Clipping masks and folder masks
- Adjustment layers: Hue/Saturation, Levels, Curves, Exposure, Gradient Map, Grain, Black & White, Color Balance, Invert, and filter layers: Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, Progressive Blur, Sharpen, Reduce Noise, Noise, Vignette, Bloom / Glow, RGB Split, Lens Effects and Tonal Contrast
- Layer effects: Stroke, Drop Shadow, Color Overlay, Inner Shadow, Outer Glow and Inner Glow, rendered on the GPU and editable at any time
- Merge Down, Merge Layers and Merge Group (⌘E)
- Duplicate, rename inline, reorder and nest by drag and drop; Option-drag to duplicate; a right-click menu in the Layers panel
- Copy and paste whole layers and folders (⌘C/⌘V with no selection), within a project or between projects, or drag them between projects

 Transform
- Non-destructive move, scale, rotate and flip — images keep their full resolution however small you make them
- Free distort (⌘-drag a handle), with Shift to lock to an axis
- Transform several layers, or a whole folder, together
- Snapping to canvas and layer edges and centers, with guides
- Distances (View › Show › Distances): pixel gaps to the canvas edges and nearby layers while moving a layer, and to the layer under the pointer with ⌘ held
- Exact values for position, size, scale and angle, stepped with the arrow keys
- Flip Layer and Flip Canvas, horizontal and vertical
- Align and Distribute layers to each other, the selection or the canvas, from the Move tool's bar or the Layer menu

 Selections
- Rectangle and Ellipse Marquee, Freehand and Polygonal Lasso, and the Magic tool — Wand selects by color, Object traces whatever you click (Tab switches)
- Select Subject, and Expand, Contract and Feather on any selection
- Add to and subtract from selections, move the outline, or move and duplicate the pixels inside
- Load a layer's pixels or a mask as a selection
- Content-Aware Fill, which can also extend an image past its edges

 Painting and retouchi

Top issues

Latest release

- Opening a PNG or other image names the canvas after the file, and Export and Save start with its name and folder
- Export As remembers the format you last used and opens with ⌥⇧⌘S, Photoshop's familiar shortcut