ArcBrush – Node-based 2D image editor

jawngee•25 minutes ago

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.

vessenes•about 3 hours ago

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.

sorenjan•7 minutes ago

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.

viraptor•about 3 hours ago

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

johndough•about 2 hours ago

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=...

nacs•about 1 hour ago

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.

Daub•about 3 hours ago

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.

NatKarmios•3 days ago

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.

johanvts•about 3 hours ago

How does it compare to graphite.rs ?

archerx•about 3 hours ago

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.

ArcBrush – Node-based 2D image editor

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