Let me preface this post by saying, I originally created a popular photoshop contest site called Worth1000, and once had an epic tournament against SA).

It's a no-brainer that most people can't afford a legal copy of Photoshop and offering a free, powerful alternative in the browser would be seriously useful and convenient. With this in mind my team (all goons actually) just created the closest alternative to Photoshop to be released online yet.

We'll that is actually underselling things a little bit. We've been working on creating an entire creative suite in your browser.


Vector editing, pattern editing, image editing, 3D modeling, video editing, music editing and a dozen more tools are part of the suite we call Aviary.



http://a.viary.com

You can open other people's files, complete with layers, to learn from them. You can also collaborate with other people on files - all sources and derivatives are tracked with permissions and ownership intact. We also have a handy revision system, so you can access earlier versions of your work.

And we just started releasing the tools and site by invitation only.

Here are some videos showing just how powerful the tools are:

Britney Spears being detouched:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13lLocdJgEY

Hillary Clinton sheds some skin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlkAR9zNmaU



If Obama and Hillary mated:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqmLLSB0Q1g



And now, for your and her pleasure, some works of art created completely in Aviary:








A whole bunch more here:

http://a.viary.com/featured

I will give out invitations to the first 10 signups to this address (we can check the referrers to somethingawful):
http://a.viary.com

After that you can post requests in this thread and users who have received invites can invite 3 other users, which should leave you guys free to continue inviting each other.

If you receive one, I ask that you share at least one of your 3 invites, with another interested goon in this thread. I also ask that if you make something cool, you please show it off so I can award you imaginary doughnuts that I will eat (hotlinking is allowed).

So, who's interested?

DISCLAIMERS
- This is beta. There will be bugs. There may be downtime. The documentation may be lacking or nonexistant. beta.
- No public porn or anything NSFW please (you can make private files I guess). We have a lot of people in the system right now and want to make sure nobody testing at work accidentally stumbles across something unsafe, even a thumbnail.
- Please do report bugs and make suggestions. All feedback is welcome.
- Don't be a dick to other users testing out the system please. No trolling or negative comments. This is new territory and nobody wants your critical reviews yet, Mr. Ebert.
- Please share your invitations, don't create accounts to make more invitations to use yourself. We can easily kill all the accounts in a chain if I see that they aren't really being used, so it'd be a waste of your time.

Post your best photo manipulations for a chance to win an invite from me.