ArcBrush – Node-based 2D image editor | Hacker News Reader

ArcBrush – Node-based 2D image editor

arcbrush.com

99 pointsNatKarmios26 comments

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

I like the terms of service; I found this:

> All of our content is carefully written by hand, no AI was involved during the process.

https://pixieditor.net/docs/terms-of-service/

This looks really cool!

Unfortunately since it's not FOSS and there's no information about the company/individuals behind it, or even a way to pay for it/get licensing information from your UI, there is absolutely no way I would download it as a binary and run it on my computer as you suggest. That is, IMO, incredibly sketchy

I made it and I've talked about it publicly. It's not really that sketchy.

https://x.com/albertomoss/status/2049147961926734008?s=20

That's awesome, I'll definitely try it now. To be clear my thought process was that I couldn't find any info about you or any human accountable for the project from its main site, and IME that's a strong yellow/red flag. It's not you or the project that felt sketchy but the website asking me to download and run a binary on my computer

Thanks for the feedback. I will plan to add an about section to the website so people know who made it.

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

Likely just a coincidence. There is a huge number of node-based image editors: https://www.google.com/search?q=node-based+image+editor&udm=...

Node-based editors are not new.

The Arc homepage is clearly vibe slop but with 75 nodes and backend supposedly coded in C, it looks to me like it would have taken a couple of months to get here at least, certainly not a release within 1 week of Youtube-person's mention.

It doesn't seem to be open source unfortunately.

Is there more of a smoking gun than its a node based editor?

Most of the game industry tooling is supporting that these days. Unreal, and Unity but also Houdini, Blender, Maya...

Hi! I made ArcBrush. Never heard of Plasma Studio, and other than being node-based, I don't even see the similarity if I'm being honest.

I have never been in the target audience for such software and I am not intending to change that.

However, I love it. Not because I think it executes on its promise perfectly nor that it feels safe to use. I love it because it knows what it hates: Electron; subscriptions; AI-first; single-platform; interpreted software; big, fat, sloppy files. I hate those things in my end-user applications, too.

I hope they figure out how to create enough transparency and trustworthiness to make a sustainable business out of it, because I want to think that such businesses are still possible.

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.

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.

What do you consider to be a "normal size screen"? Since you mention trackpad I assume it's a laptop, so 13-15 inches? That was considered a normal size screen in the 90s, I don't think we should consider the compromise that laptops are to be the norm.

It all depends on your vision, doesn't it? 13 inches was a normal-size screen when we had five pieces of information on it at 640x480, but now that we have 4k screens jam packed with elements, it's no longer a good size.

I'm not sure saying something like "we used to send letters to each other a hundred years ago so we should be fine without mobiles" is such an ironclad argument.

I don't know what point you're trying to make, but my point was that laptop screens are small because they're the result of a compromise to make them portable, and we shouldn't consider them normal size. If you get an actual normal size monitor, which I would consider to be 24+ inches, node based editors work just fine.

Ah, I misunderstood and thought you were making the opposite point, sorry.

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.

The vast majority of what people do in photoshop can be done with node based editors that already exist. Most people edit photos and that can be done with roto shapes and manipulation instead of painting.

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.

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.

How does it compare to graphite.rs ?

No multiple colorspaces support, alas, only RGBA. It reminds me of https://filterforge.com/ which has been around forever.

RGB is not a color space but a color model.

sRGB or ACEScg are color spaces.

CMYK or RGB etc. are color models.

This matters a lot. And yeah, it seems this supports neither and it is unclear if operations happen in linear light at a bit depth of at more that 8bit/channel.

If they don't, most of them will produce subtly wrong results.

Does the website have any examples that don't look like low-effort slop?

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