That time I recreated Photoshop in C++

The first one is about that time I recreated Photoshop in C++ and Windows API! I invite you to read my story and leave a comment with feedback, it’s hard to go on without your input 🙂

Everything started in early summer of 2006. I was reading *a lot* of manga back then. But all the image reading apps sucked. Specifically, none of the apps allowed me to control my reading using just the mouse, and reaching my keyboard all the time was distracting. Since I just finished the C++/Windows API course at the uni, I spent the summer break coding my perfect manga reader. And I named it Fiew.

Early autumn 2006 we returned to uni and had to decide on our final thesis for the degree. Writing the image viewer went smooth enough that I got the idea I could create an image editor as well. I was a heavy Adobe Photoshop user back then, so that became my goal. I mean, how hard can it be? Turns out, very.

Over the course of the next several months, I wrote Advanced Image Editor named Fedit in C++ using Windows API and GDI+ graphic libraries. It followed a set of five rules to benefit the end user: no installers, no archives, no registry keys, no additional runtimes and a single executable file. The result was a program that was ready to work without the need of installation, could be run on systems with limited privileges (or straight from a thumb drive) and consumed small amounts of resources.

I was very careful to make the interface look like classic Photoshop, and include all my most used features. So you had all the free floating windows with tools. The excellent colour picker. Easy layer management. Step-by-step reversible history. Several image filters, plus a matrix interface to encode your own pixel shifting filters too.

Straight from my previous project named Fiew I added a massive image library viewer. It really could quickly and easily scroll through massive amounts of pictures.

I had a lot of fun coding Fedit. And a lot of issues along the way. I spent a ton of time on MSDN and Stack Overflow, however that didn’t help that much since most of the issues were so specific I had to analyse and debug them on my own. But I worked like crazy on it, my motivation was immense. I had to make the bachelor thesis deadline, so for the final two-month stint I worked 14 hours a day.

User interface was the most tricky bit. I wanted the workflow to resemble Photoshop as much as possible. The freely snapping-unsnapping of the tool settings pane was particularly hard. But no less than recreating the colour picker or the tool selector.

By the time I finished I was pretty exhausted and kind of resenting WinAPI. But the thesis was a success and I received my Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the Warsaw University of Technology. Fedit received several positive reviews online but I didn’t promote it. Instead I took a well deserved holiday. A few months later thanks to the impression Fiew and Fedit made on the CTO of GoldenLine (Polish LinkedIn, market leader in its time, but now defunct), I landed a C++ job with a task to create extremely efficient WinAPI app to handle massive image uploading for a clone of Flickr. So in the end all that effort paid off.

Fedit (and Fiew) source code is available on GitHub. The thesis documentation is available as PDF. The original website for these apps is still up on the Web Archive!