Next Phase Graphics

Windows image editor · v1.0.0

Layers. RAW. Vectors.
One small, fast editor.

Next Phase Graphics opens layered PSD files with every layer intact, develops camera RAW, draws vector shapes and keeps 16 bits per channel from the first stroke to the export. There's no installer; unzip it and start editing.

Download for Windows Take the tour

84 MB zip · Windows 10 / 11 x64 · no installer, no .NET runtime needed

Next Phase Graphics editing a synthwave poster: chrome title text with layer effects, a vector sun, a neon grid, and curves and color balance adjustment layers

What's inside

The tools you reach for daily, and little else

Compositing, retouching, RAW development and web graphics cover most real editing work, so that's where the effort went.

Layers that behave

Opacity, 26 blend modes, nested groups, layer masks, clipping masks, merge and flatten. Drag to reorder, Ctrl+click to select pixels.

Non-destructive adjustments

Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation with six color ranges, and Color Balance as adjustment layers. You can mask, hide or change them later, and the pixels underneath stay untouched.

RAW photo layers

Develop raw files from most digital cameras: white balance, tone, curves, HSL, local contrast, haze removal, masks and lens corrections. The result stays a RAW layer you can re-develop at any time.

Layer styles

Drop Shadow, Bevel & Emboss, Stroke, Inner and Outer Glow, Satin, Overlays and blend ranges. They stay editable, and PSD files bring them in with each layer.

Vector shapes & Pen

Shape layers, a full Pen tool, path selection, boolean path operations, vector masks and Free Transform on curves. Shapes stay sharp at any resize.

Editable text

Text layers with any installed font, size, weight, alignment, tracking and line spacing. Double-click a text layer to edit it again.

GPU accelerated

The graphics card draws the screen and the RAW previews, so big documents stay responsive. The CPU renders every export, and the file comes out identical with or without a graphics card.

History that's cheap

Undo stores only what changed, so a brush stroke costs kilobytes instead of a full image copy, and the History panel jumps back to any earlier step.

Open, documented format

A .psm project keeps every layer, mask, style and RAW setting. It's a plain ZIP of JSON and 16-bit PNGs; rename it to .zip and you can pull out any layer by hand.

RAW developer

Develop the photo without leaving the document

Open a raw file and a full developer comes up. Confirm it, and the photo lands in your document as a RAW layer that keeps the original file and every setting, so a double-click takes you back to the sliders.

The RAW editor with the basic panel open: profile, white balance and tone sliders next to a night skyline

Local masks you place yourself

Drag a linear gradient's start and end to any position and angle on the frame, or set a radial gradient's centre, both radii and its rotation, then soften the edge with feather. Gradients and brush strokes combine with add, subtract and intersect; each mask can be inverted, faded with density and given its own exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, temperature, tint, saturation, texture, local contrast, haze removal and sharpness.

Tone

Exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks, plus a parametric curve with movable split points and point curves for RGB and each channel.

White balance & colour

As shot, auto, temperature and tint, or a neutral picker. Vibrance, saturation and a hue, saturation and luminance mixer over eight colour bands.

Looks & profiles

Seven built-in looks from Color to Monochrome work with any camera. You can import your own camera colour profiles, and creative looks get a strength slider from 0 to 200 %.

Detail

Sharpening with amount, radius, detail and edge masking. Luminance and colour noise reduction are separate, and the colour side measures the noise at every scale, so blotches go without smearing texture.

Optics

Automatic colour-fringe alignment, manual distortion and vignetting with a midpoint, purple and green defringe with their own hue ranges, and clipped highlights rebuilt from the surrounding glow.

Crop & geometry

Crop with aspect presets, straighten, quarter turns and flips. None of it touches the raw data.

Many files at once

Open a batch and a filmstrip appears. Every slider you move applies to all selected frames, each keeping its own other settings, and Sync Settings copies the whole look across.

Output colour

The pipeline runs in floating point in a wide-gamut space and hands over 16 bits per channel in sRGB, Display P3, Rec. 2020, ProPhoto or your own ICC profile.

Stays a raw file

The RAW layer embeds the original file or links to it; a linked file that moved together with the project is found again, and relinking checks the file's fingerprint before it accepts a replacement. Masks stay shapes and strokes too, so they're redrawn at full resolution on every render.

Tour

See it in action

A synthwave poster built from groups, masked raster layers, a vector sun, editable text and adjustment layers
Real compositing. This poster stacks groups, a masked nebula, a vector sun with boolean cut-outs, a grid in Screen mode, editable text, and Curves and Color Balance on top. You can still change any part of it.
A neon sign on a brick wall: pink NEON letters, a cyan triangle and amber DISTRICT lettering, all text and shape layers with glow effects
Effects stay live. Every neon tube here is a text or shape layer with Color Overlay, Inner Glow, Outer Glow and a Drop Shadow on the wall, while Bevel & Emboss gives the bricks their depth. Retype a word and the glow follows it.
The RAW editor developing a night skyline photograph
A RAW developer built in. It reads camera color profiles, rebuilds clipped highlights, corrects lens distortion and supports local masks, and the result stays editable as a RAW layer.
The welcome screen with the Next Phase Graphics logo, New Document and Open buttons
A calm, neutral workspace. Nothing in the gray interface competes with your image for attention. Drop a file anywhere on the window to open it.

Formats

Opens what you already have

Open & import

  • PSD
  • PSB
  • PNG 8/16
  • JPEG
  • WebP
  • TIFF
  • BMP
  • GIF
  • TGA
  • SVG
  • PDF
  • AI
  • EPS
  • ARW
  • DNG
  • CR2
  • NEF
  • + most RAW

Save & export

  • .psm project
  • PNG 16-bit
  • JPEG
  • WebP lossless
  • SVG
  • PDF

Also: copy and paste with other apps, drag & drop onto the window or the exe, and a New Document preset sized to the image on the clipboard.

Take it anywhere

The whole program is one self-contained executable, so you can copy the folder to another PC or a USB stick and run it there without installing anything.

  1. 1Download the zip
  2. 2Unpack it anywhere
  3. 3Run NextPhaseGraphics.exe

The zip also holds the two example projects from the tour; open one and pick apart every layer and effect.

Download v1.0.0

NextPhaseGraphics-1.0.0-win-x64.zip · 84 MB · built 2026-10-16

System requirements & first start
  • Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.
  • Optional: a Direct3D 11 graphics card with 1 GB or more of video memory for GPU rendering. Without one, the CPU does the work.
  • The exe isn't code-signed, so SmartScreen may warn you on the first start. Click More info → Run anyway.
  • Settings live in %AppData%\NextPhaseGraphics. To uninstall, delete the program folder and that one.