I am pleased to announce that first public version of the PhotoRaster is now available. Feature set of this version is very limited, but don't worry new features are coming very soon. There is list of the features which you can try in the public version.
The PhotoRaster is not only aiming to be pioneer in the computer graphics but also in the underlying technologies. Other similar applications are mostly based on the Flash, which allows them to inherit many rich features from Flash API. These Flash core features are very powerful and allows developers to create graphics applications relatively "easily", but Flash has one big drawback. When you want to go beyond these core features or extend existing ones then you have to write them from scratch using AcionScript which is not fast enough for real time complex image processing. Same problem is with applications based on HTML5 Canvas. But there is a hope which comes with WebGL and in the future with WebCL. With WebGL most of the image processing is done on the fast GPU and only these algorithms which are not suitable or practical for GPU processing will be done using JavaScript. Of curse it is not so easy as it sounds, there are many obstacles to overcome as I discovered during development of PhotoRaster. It is difficult but not impossible. After about year of the development I can honestly say that PhotoRaster will go well beyond features of already existing web applications and in some cases beyond features of professional desktop applications.
PhotoRaster is going to be advanced online photo editor. There are already some other online photo editors or drawing applications on the web, but PhotoRaster is aiming to be little more serious web application. Goal is to use proved photo editing techniques and improve them were it is possible. Nowadays with power of the GPUs there are opening new unexplored possibilities and PhotoRaster is there to explore them. One very cool feature which you can expect in PhotoRaster are layer masks. Unlike other similar programs which usually have only one or two masks per layer, in PhotoRaster you can have up to four masks per layer. Now imagine adjustment layers, where masks affect not only opacity but also other parameters like contrast or brightness. This is just one example of new features which you can expect in PhotoRaster. First releases of the PhotoRaster will have very limited feature set, which will be gradually expanded in the future. Welcome at the beginning of the very exiting road to the future of the computer graphics.