Photoshop Alternatives

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.

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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.

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Alternatives list

  1. Black Ink icon
     21 likes
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    Black Ink is a digital painting software that uses your computer's rendering hardware to provide a perfectly responsive experience no matter your picture's size.

    Cost / License

    • Freemium
    • Proprietary

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  2. PictBear icon
     6 likes
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    PictBear is an image editor and paint program that is very friendly toward the beginning user, PictBear is very straightforward and easy to use no matter what your skill level is.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Proprietary

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  3. Copy a direct link to this comment to your clipboard

    Chasys Draw IES is a suite of applications including a layer-based image editor with animation, icon editing support and super-resolution via image stacking (Chasys Draw IES Artist), a multi-threaded image file converter (Chasys Draw IES Converter), a fast image viewer (Chasys...

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Proprietary

    Application types

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  4. Canvas GFX icon
     13 likes
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    Canvas 11 is the single most cost-effective, integrated solution for the creation, enhancement, presentation and sharing of technical illustrations and graphics.

    25 Canvas GFX alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Paid
    • Proprietary

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  5. Picozu icon
     6 likes
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    Picozu Editor is a drawing and photo retouching application built on Javascript, HTML 5 and CSS3. Make sure you use a modern browser if you want to play with it.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Proprietary

    Platforms

    • Online
     
  6. Copy a direct link to this comment to your clipboard

    AI-powered photo editing tool with features like photo enhancement, object and background removal, and AI art generation. Upscale images to 8K, enhance facial features, remove noise, blemishes, colorize, and fix faded photos. Includes portrait, object, and background editing.

    36 HitPaw FotorPea alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Freemium (Subscription)
    • Proprietary

    Application types

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Online
     
  7. PixelStyle icon
     10 likes
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    PixelStyle Photo Editor for Mac is an all-in-one photo editing and graphic design software, providing professional high-quality photo processing tools to edit the photos, enhance and touch up photos on Mac OS X.

    Cost / License

    • Freemium
    • Proprietary

    Application types

    Platforms

    • Mac
     
  8. PhoXo icon
     14 likes
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    PhoXo is small and free image editing application. It's tiny, fast, easy to use, can be treated as a mini PhotoShop. Its features include layers, undo, over 50 special effects, batch processing, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools for selecting, crop, painting...

    92 PhoXo alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application types

    Alerts

    • Discontinued

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  9. Photo POS Pro icon
     2 likes
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    Photo Pos Pro Photo Editor is a free photo editor offers users a wide variety of possibilities in the fields of Image Enhancing and Image Editing and in the field of Computer Graphics Design. Using the editor you can perform various tasks, from simple basic tasks to complex...

    73 Photo POS Pro alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Proprietary

    Application types

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
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