Adobe Photoshop serves as a professional raster graphics editor for Windows and macOS, handling advanced image editing, retouching, and digital art. Users praise its extensive feature set for graphics and design, though many complain about high pricing compared to other editors.
GIMP tops the rankings as the leading Photoshop alternative, offering broad image-editing and retouching tools completely free and open-source. Many users switch to GIMP specifically to escape Photoshop's cloud licensing and subscription model. Affinity Photo ranks second with its polished interface and one-time purchase model, repeatedly highlighted as a cost advantage over subscription pricing. Luminar Neo brings AI tools like GenErase and GenExpand plus focus stacking and HDR merging for photographer-centric workflows.
Krita ranks third, focusing on digital painting with advanced brush control and animation support for artists. The alternatives landscape splits between pro photo editors and art-first painting apps, with Photopea standing out as a free, install-free option with PSD support and a familiar interface.
For open source transparency, GIMP and Krita lead with community-driven development and no proprietary licensing restrictions. Linux users have native options in GIMP, Krita, and MyPaint without relying on Windows or macOS-only tools. Windows-only picks include Paint.NET and Corel PaintShop Pro for desktop editing with layers, effects, and selection tools.
Web-based editors like Photopea, Pixlr, and Sumo Paint work in browsers when you can't install software on school or locked-down computers. Users avoiding subscriptions can choose Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer for predictable one-time licensing. For PSD workflows, Photopea, Affinity Photo, and Pixelmator open Photoshop-format documents to maintain collaboration compatibility. iPad workflows benefit from Affinity Photo, Pixelmator, and Pixlr for editing on tablets rather than desktop-only setups.
Batch AI Photo Sharpener is a Windows desktop photo enhancement software program that enables users to sharpen and enhance photos and images in bulk offline by the AI (Artificial Intelligence) deep learning algorithm.
In addition to being totally portable, Fotografix has a ridiculously small footprint. Its a 370Kb download and about 700Kb once extracted. Despite its size, most of the features I rely on in Photoshop are available.
Pro Paint for Mac is the realistic full-featured digital art software that is used for painting, image editing, vector drawing, free-form transformation, cropping, alpha channel editing, and more specialized tasks.
Professional Photo Editor Online. Work with Google Drive. Paint by Touchscreen or Stylus Pen. Support Layers, Paths, and Pixel Art. Free, Fast, Easy to Use.
COLOR projects is your reliable partner to develop enduring images as quickly as possible and with the least stress
RealWorld Photos is an free portable photo editor for Windows. Retouch photographs and batch process images in an easy-to-use editor. Perform lossless retouching, watermarking and other operations on .jpg images.
Picture enhancer for removing problems, blemishes, unwanted items and retrieving the 'wanted' image!
IsoPaint is a quick, simple & fun isometric drawing app. It's designed to make isometric drawing easy for everyone, with no complicated layers, menus, filters or excessive tapping like similar apps.
PhotoStyler is the easiest way to style your digital photos with your Mac. This simple, fast and accurate native solution combines the powers of Apple’s core technologies with the flexibility and efficiency of proprietary application-specific modules.
Professional perspective correction tool fixing lens distortion, horizons, and leaning buildings. Auto lens profiles, content-aware resizing, portrait reshaping, batch processing.
ArtEffect 4 offers many new functions, and most parts have been reworked. The most noticable features are: heavily improved layers, indexed colors, improved color ranges, new filters and many optimizations.
Very powerfull image processing, editing, and retouching. Fully supported 48 bit color mode (in layers and all filters), automatic enhancement (Red Eye removal, Scratch and Dust removal, and more with one click), over 130 image processing tools, measure module, scripting and...
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