I trained as a graphic designer. Before that meant anything on a résumé, it meant years of learning the tools. Really learning them, the way you learn an instrument. Pen tool paths until they were muscle memory. Masks, channels, blend modes, the whole vocabulary.
Then I started a promotional products company, and the tools stopped being coursework and became my actual day. Whole workdays inside Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop: vectorizing a customer's fuzzy logo, separating colors for screen printing, mocking up artwork on a hundred different products. I wasn't a casual user with opinions. I was living in these programs.
And slowly, one frustration grew until it turned into this project.
The thing I kept waiting for
Let me be fair first, because this is not a hit piece. Adobe has shipped genuinely impressive AI. Firefly is real. Generative fill is legitimately magic the first time you watch it rebuild the edge of a photo. Credit where it's due: those teams did hard things well.
But I wanted something specific, and year after year it didn't arrive.
I wanted deterministic, precise editing control side by side with AI image generation. Not one or the other. Not a "creative AI app" where everything is a prompt and you can't nudge a pixel. And not a professional editor where AI is a feature bolted onto a corner of the workflow. I wanted the precision toolkit I'd spent years learning (real layers, real masks, real selections) in the same document, on the same canvas, as genuinely powerful image models.
When you've done production work, you know why this matters. AI gets you 80% of the way in ten seconds. The last 20% is deterministic work: the edge that isn't clean, the color that doesn't match the brand, the text that has to sit exactly there. It's masks and curves and a steady hand. A tool that only does one half of that is only half a tool.
I got tired of waiting for someone to build both halves in one place. So I built it.
What PhotoFresco is
PhotoFresco is a Photoshop-class editor that runs entirely in your browser. No download, no install, no sign-up. You open the page and you're editing.
"Photoshop-class" is a big claim, so here's what's actually built today: a real layer system with masks and blend modes. The full selection toolkit, from object selection and quick selection to the magic wand and lasso. Brushes, filters, adjustment layers, free transform. The complete layer-style stack: drop shadows, glows, bevels, strokes, all ten effects, shipped in full. And PSD import and export, so files round-trip with the desktop world you may still work in.
Alongside all of that: AI image generation, in the same app, feeding the same layer stack. Generate an image, and it lands as a layer you can mask, transform, and blend like anything else. That's the combination I couldn't buy anywhere.
One more thing, because it matters more than people expect: your files never leave your device. All editing runs locally, on your machine. Nothing is uploaded to a server. That's not a marketing line; it's just how the thing is built. It means the editor works offline, it's fast, and client work you're not allowed to share is safe by construction, because there's nothing to leak.
Who it's for
The mission is simple: everyone should have easy access to powerful image-editing tools alongside powerful AI image models, not locked behind an expensive subscription.
When I was learning, a license was serious money for a student. You planned around it, shared machines that had it, made do without it. The skills are more learnable than ever now, and the software is still gated. That gate is what I want gone. The student, the shop owner making product images, the designer between gigs: the full editor should just be there for them.
How the money works, plainly
I'd rather be upfront about how this pays for itself, so here it is in plain words.
The editor is free. Actually free: the full app, forever, not a trial. The free version is funded by ads. If the ads bother you, ad-free is a small subscription ($8 a month) that also adds cloud drive storage. And I'll be plain about it, because being plain is the point of this section: it auto-renews until you cancel. Canceling is one click in your account, with no retention tricks, and you keep everything you paid for through the end of the period. Your files are never held hostage either: if a plan ends, anything in the cloud drive stays downloadable, and local editing never needed a plan at all.
AI generation costs money because it costs us money. Every generation runs on server GPUs we pay for. So we charge for it the cheapest, fairest way we could design: usage-based credit packs. You buy credits when you want them and spend them per generation. No monthly fee, no recurring charge, no expiring "included" allowance. If you never touch AI, you never pay a cent.
That's the whole model. It's the same explanation you'll see inside the app the first time you open it, because I'd rather over-explain the economics than have anyone feel tricked. The free core is the product, not the bait.
Try it
PhotoFresco is young, and I'm building it in the open. The editor gets better every week, and the roadmap is shaped by what people actually do with it.
If any of this sounds familiar, if you've ever wanted Photoshop-grade control and modern AI in one canvas without a paywall in the way, open the editor and make something. It's free, there's no sign-up, and your files stay yours.
— Josh